Touching the Void (3 page)

Richard had decided to accompany us as far as the glacier, and we got away next morning at a steady pace under a hot sun. After an hour we reached the beginning of the glacier and started up a steep gully between the lower glacier moraines and a shield of ice-worn rock that formed the left bank of the glacier. Mud and rubble gave way to a jumble of boulders and scree. It was awkward scrambling round and over these obstacles, some of which were many times the size of a man, and it was all the more difficult with large sacks on our backs. Richard kept up well after two weeks at high altitude but a bristling series of ice spikes and mud-smeared glacier ice, visible from where we rested, presented a formidable obstacle to him in lightweight walking shoes. To get past, and up on to the glacier, we would have to negotiate a short, steep, ice cliff some 80 to 100 feet high. Large rocks were balanced precariously above the line of ascent.

‘I don’t think you should come any further,’ Simon said. ‘We could get you up there, but not back again.’

Richard looked around ruefully at the barren view of mud and perched boulders. He had been hoping for something more impressive than this. The West Face of Siula was not yet in view. ‘I’ll take your pictures before you go,’ he announced. ‘You never know, I might make a fortune selling them as obituary photos!’

‘Much appreciated, I’m sure!’ Simon muttered.

We left him there among the boulders. From our position high above on the ice cliffs he looked forlornly abandoned. He was in for a lonely time.

‘Take care!’ wafted up to us from cupped hands below.

‘Don’t worry,’ Simon shouted, ‘we don’t intend sticking our necks out. We’ll be back in time. See you!

The lonely figure was soon lost amid the boulders as we headed up towards the first crevasses, where we put on our crampons and roped up. The heat of the glacier was intense under the glare reflected from icy mountain walls. There was not a breath of wind. The glacier edge was cracked and contorted, and we looked back at our route so as to fix the features in our minds. Neither of us wanted to forget it on the way down. Our tracks would certainly have disappeared under fresh snow by then, and it was important to know whether to go below or above the crevasses when we returned.

As a cold clear night came over the mountains we were cosily ensconced in our snow hole beneath the face. It would be a freezing early-morning start tomorrow.

Tempting Fate

It was cold. Five-in-the-morning cold, on a high Andean glacier. I struggled with zips and gaiters until my fingers would not work, and I rocked back and forward, hands in my crotch, moaning with the hot aches. It had never been this bad before, I thought, as the pain in my fingers fired up, but then I always thought that with hot aches. So damned painful.

Simon grinned at my agony. I knew that once warmed up I wouldn’t get the aches again. It was some consolation.

‘I’ll go first, shall I?’ Simon said, knowing he had me at a disadvantage. I nodded miserably, and he set off up the avalanche cone above our snow hole towards the icefield which reared up in blue early-morning ice.

Right then, this was it! I looked at Simon leaning above the small crevasse at the base of the face and planting his ice axe firmly into the steep ice wall above. The weather looked perfect. No telltale cloud front running a storm this time. If it held we’d be up and half-way down before the next bad spell.

I stamped my feet, trying to get my boots warmed up. Fragments of ice tinkled down on to my shoulders as Simon hammered axes up the ice, bunny-hopping his feet, then axes in again. I ducked from the cold shower, looking away to the south at the sky lightening by the minute above the summit of Sarapo.

When I next looked up Simon was nearly at the end of the rope, 150 feet above me. I had to crane my neck to see him. It was very steep.

Following his cheery shout I sorted out my axes, checked my crampons, and started up towards the wall. As I reached the crevasse I realised how precipitously steep it was. I felt off balance, forced out by the angle, until I had hauled myself out over the lip of the crevasse and up on to the ice wall. Stiff and uncoordinated at first, I struggled unnecessarily until, warmed by the effort, my body began to flow into rhythmic movements, and a rush of exultation at being here set me off up towards the distant figure.

Simon stood on the outside of one foot, hanging back on the ice screws hammered into the ice, casual, relaxed:

‘Steep, isn’t it?’

‘Almost vertical, that bit at the bottom,’ I replied, ‘but the ice is brilliant! I’ll bet this is steeper than the Droites.’

Simon gave me the remaining screws and I carried on above him, sweating now, the morning cold driven off. Head down, keep looking at your feet, swing, swing, hop, look at your feet, swing swing…all the way up a smooth 150 feet, no effort, no headache, feeling on top of the world. I drove in the screws, seeing the ice crack, split and protest—drive in, solid, clip in, lean back, relax. This was it!

I felt the flow, the heat and blood and strength flowing. It was right. ‘Yeeee haaaaaaaa!’—listen to that echo, round and round the glacier. Thin wandering footprints, shadow lines, could be seen twisting up from the darker shadow of the collapsed snow hole on the glacier, already a long way down.

Simon was coming up, hitting hard, ice splintering down below him, hitting hard and strong, walking up on points of steel, head down, hitting, hopping, on past me and up, without a word, just hitting hard, breathing steady, getting smaller.

We climbed higher, 1,000 feet, 2,000, until we wondered when this icefield would end, and the rhythm became ragged with the monotony. We kept looking up and to our right, following the line we had chosen—a line that now looked different with the shortened perspective. The rock buttress swept up beside us into tangled gullies. Ribboned snow on the ledges, ice weeps and icicles everywhere, but where was the gully we wanted?

The sun was fully up; jackets and tops were in the sacks. Following Simon, I was slowing with the heat, dry-mouthed, wanting a drink. The angle eased. Looking to my right, I smiled seeing Simon with legs astride a large rock, sack off, taking a photograph of me as I came over the top edge of the icefield and headed towards him on an easy ramp line.

‘Lunch,’ he said, passing me a chocolate bar and some prunes. The gas stove hissed away busily, sheltered by his rucksack. ‘The brew’s nearly ready.’

I sat back, glad to rest in the sun and look around. It was past noon, and warm. Ice clattered down from the headwall which reared 2,000 feet above us. For the moment we were safe. The rock on which we lunched topped a slight rib, splitting the ground above the icefield so that the debris tumbled harmlessly past on either side. We sat, perched above the icefield, which was steeply sloped, dropping like a vertical wall beneath our lunch rock. A giddy, dragging sensation urged me to lean further out over the drop, pulling me down at the snow-ice sweeping away below. Looming over, with my stomach clenched, and a sharp strong sense of danger, I enjoyed the feeling. Our footsteps and the snow hole were no longer visible, lost in the dazzling blur of white ice and white glacier. With the wind tonight all signs of our passing would be gone.

The upper tiers of the great yellow rock buttress which split the face crowded out our view of the way ahead. As we climbed up parallel with it, we began to see just how big it was—a respectable 1,000-foot-high wall which would have been a mountain in itself in the Dolomites. Stones had whirred down from the upper reaches all day, smacking into the right side of the icefield, then bouncing and wheeling down to the glacier. Thank God we hadn’t climbed any nearer to the buttress! From a distance the stones seemed small and harmless, but the smallest, falling free from many hundreds of feet above, would have hurt us as surely as any rifle bullet.

We had to find the steep ice couloir which ran up through the side of this buttress, and would eventually lead us into the wide hanging gully we had seen from Seria Norte. This would be the key to the climb. We had under six hours to find it, climb it, and dig a comfortable snow cave in the gully above. A large ice cliff hung out from the edge of the hanging gully, streaming twenty- to thirty-foot icicles—free-hanging above the 200-foot wall below. That was what we wanted to get into, but it would be impossible to go directly up the wall through the fringe of icicles. ‘How much higher do you reckon the couloir is?’ I asked, seeing that Simon was examining the rocks intently.

‘We’ll have to go higher,’ he said. ‘It can’t be that one.’ He pointed to an extremely steep cascade of icicles just left of the ice cliff.

‘It might go, but it isn’t the one we saw. You’re right, it’s above that mixed ground.’ We wasted no more time. I put the stove away, and sorted out ice screws and axes before I led off, crossing the ramp, and then front-pointing up steepening water ice. The ice was harder and more brittle. I could see Simon, when I looked between my feet, ducking away from large chunks of ice that were breaking away from my axes. I heard his curses as some big pieces made painful direct hits.

Simon joined me at the belay and told me what he thought of my bombardment.

‘Well, it’s my turn now.’

He carried on up, following a slanting line to the right over bulges and areas of thin ice which showed the rock bared in places. I ducked away from some heavy ice fall, then more, before a warning doubt clicked in my head. Simon was above me, but off to the right! I looked up to see where the ice was coming from and saw the corniced summit ridge far above me. Some of the cornices overhung the West Face by as much as forty feet, and we were directly under their fallline. Suddenly the day seemed less casual and relaxed. I watched Simon’s progress, now agonisingly slow and hunched up, my hair bristling at the thought of a cornice collapse. I followed him as fast as I could. He too had realised the danger.

‘Christ! Let’s get out of here,’ he said, passing me the ice screws.

I set off hurriedly. A cascade of ice dropped over steep underlying rocks in a fifty-foot step. I could see it was steep, 80° maybe, and hammered in a screw when I reached its base. I would climb it in one push, then move right.

Water was running under the ice, and in places the rock sparked as my axe hit it. I slowed down, climbing carefully, cautious of rushing into a mistake. Holding on to my left axe near the top of the cascade, I tiptoed out on my front points. Halfway into swinging my right axe, a sudden dark object rushed at me.

‘Rocks!’ I yelled, ducking down and away. Heavy blows thudded into my shoulder, whacking against my sack, and then it was past, and I watched Simon looking straight up at my warning. The boulder, about four-foot square, swept below me directly at him. It seemed an age before he reacted, and when he did it was with a slow-motion casualness which I found hard to believe. He leaned to his left and dropped his head as the heavy stone seemed to hit him full-on. I shut my eyes, and hunched harder as more stones hit me. When I looked again, Simon was all but hidden beneath the sack which he had swept up over his head.

‘You okay?’

‘Yes!’ he shouted from behind his sack.

‘I thought you were hit.’

‘Only by small stuff. Get moving, I don’t like it here.’

I climbed the last few feet of the cascade, and moved quickly right to the shelter of the rock. Simon grinned when he reached me:

‘Where did that lot come from?’

‘I don’t know. I only saw it at the last moment. Too bloody close!’

‘Let’s get on. I can see the gully from here.’

Boosted with adrenalin, he climbed quickly towards the steep icy couloir visible in a corner of the main buttress. It was four-thirty. We had an hour and a half of light left.

I went on past his stance for another full rope length but the couloir seemed no nearer. The flat, white light made it hard to gauge distances. Simon set out on the last short pitch to the foot of the couloir.

‘We ought to bivi here,’ I said. ‘It will be dark soon.’

‘Yeah, but there’s no chance of a snow hole, or any ledges.’

I could see he was right. Any night spent here would be uncomfortable. It was already getting hard to see.

‘I’ll try and get up this before dark.’

‘Too late…it is dark!’

‘Well, I bloody hope we can do it in one rope length then.’ I didn’t like the prospect of blundering around on steep ice in the dark trying to sort out belays.

I made a short traverse left to the foot of the couloir. ‘Jesus! This is overhanging, and the ice is terrible!’

Simon said nothing.

Twenty feet of rotten honeycombed ice reared up in front of me, but above that I could see it relented and lay back to a more reasonable angle. I banged an ice screw into the good water ice at the foot of the wall, clipped the rope through it, turned my head-torch on, took a deep breath, and started climbing.

I was nervous at first for the angle forced me backwards, and the honeycombs crunched and sharded away beneath my feet, but the axes, biting deeper into harder ice, were solid and soon I was engrossed. A short panting struggle and the wall was beneath me, Simon no longer in sight. I stood on tiptoe on glassy hard water ice, blue in my torchlight, curving up above me into shadows. The dark night silence was broken only by my axe blows and the wavering cone of light from my torch. The climbing held me completely, so that Simon might as well not have been there. Hit hard. Hit again—that’s it, now the hammer. Look at your feet. Can’t see them. Kick hard, and again. On up, peering into shadows, trying to make out the line. The blue glass curves left, like a bob-sleigh run, the angle steepening under a huge fringe of icicles on the right. Is that another way up, behind the icicles? I move up, under the ice fringe. A few icicles break away, and thump tinkle down, chandelier sounds in the dark, and a muffled shout echoes up to me from below—no time to answer. This way is wrong. Damn, damn! Get back down, reverse it. No! Put a screw in. I fumble at my harness for a screw but can’t find one—forget it, just get back below the icicles. I shouted down to Simon when I reached the couloir again, but I couldn’t hear his reply. Spindrift powder rushed down in a burst from above. Unexpected, it made my heart leap.