Touching the Void (6 page)

‘Which way should I go? Can you see anything?’

‘Don’t go left.’

‘Why?’

‘It seems to drop away, and it looks bloody dangerous!’

‘What’s on the right?’

‘Can’t see, but the flutings are not so steep. It’s a lot better than the left anyway.’ I hesitated. Once I started ploughing through a fluting I might be unable to return. I didn’t want to find myself in an even worse position. However high I stretched I couldn’t see into the gully on my right. I wasn’t even sure there would be a gully there, and none of the snow I could see above me gave any idea of what might be awaiting me.

‘Okay. Watch the ropes,’ I shouted as I began to dig into the right-hand side of the gully. Then I laughed at what I had just said. It would do no good concentrating on belaying if the belay was going to rip straight out.

To my surprise, digging furiously with both axes into the fluting was no harder than climbing the gully, and I emerged, breathing hard, on the other side, in an identical steepening gully above which I could see the huge cornice of the summit only a rope’s length away. Simon floundered up to me and whooped when he saw the summit behind me.

‘Cracked it,’ he said.

‘I hope so, but this last bit looks bloody steep.’

‘It’ll go.’ He set off up the slope churning huge amounts of freezing snow down on to my exposed belay hole. I pulled my hood over my helmet and turned my back, gazing down at the glacier far below me. Suddenly our exposed stance appalled me. The loose snow was so steep and my belay so precarious that I felt a sickening disbelief in what we were doing. An excited yell tore me from my thoughts and I turned to see the rope disappearing over the top of the gully above. ‘Done it. No more flutings. Come up.’

He was sitting, legs astride a fluting, grinning manically, when I pulled myself wearily out of the gully. Behind him, less than fifty feet from us, the summit cornice reared up in a threatening bulge of snow-ice which overhung the West Face. I quickly moved past Simon and cramponed on firm snow up and to the left, where the summit cornice was smallest. Ten minutes later, I stood beneath the snow ridge dividing West Face from East.

‘Take a photo.’

I waited until Simon had his camera ready before planting my axe over the ridge on to the east side and heaving myself over onto the broad-backed col under the summit. For the first time in four days I had a new view on which to feast. The sun bathed the snow sweeping down into the eastern glacier. After the long, cold, shadowed days on the West Face it felt luxurious to sit there warmed by the sun. I had forgotten that, now we were climbing in the Southern Hemisphere, everything was the wrong way round: South Faces here were the equivalent of icy cold North Faces in the Alps, and East Faces became West. No wonder the mornings had been so cold and shadowed and we had to wait until late in the day before being blessed with a few hours’ sunshine.

Simon joined me and we laughed happily as we took off our sacks and sat on them, carelessly dropping axes and mitts in the snow, content to be quiet a while and look around us. ‘Let’s leave the sacks here and go up to the summit,’ Simon said, interrupting my self-indulgent reverie. The summit! Of course, I had forgotten we had only reached the ridge. Escaping from the West Face had seemed to be an end in itself. I looked up at the icecream cone rising behind Simon. It was only about 100 feet away.

‘You go ahead. I’ll take some photos when you reach the top’.

He grabbed some chocolate and sweets before getting up and tramping slowly up through soft snow. The altitude was having its effect. When he was outlined against the sky, bending over his axe on top of the spectacular summit cornice, I began feverishly snapping photographs. Leaving the I sacks at the col, I followed, breathing hard, and feeling the tiredness in my legs. We took the customary summit photos and ate some chocolate. I felt the usual anticlimax. What now? It was a vicious circle. If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it’s not long before you’re conjuring up, another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious—a bit more dangerous. I didn’t like the thought of where it might be leading me. As if, in some strange way, the very nature of the game was controlling me, taking me towards a logical but frightening conclusion; it always unsettled me, this moment of reaching the summit, this sudden stillness and quiet after the storm, which gave me time to wonder at what I was doing and sense a niggling doubt that perhaps I was inexorably losing control—was I here purely for pleasure or was it egotism? Did I really want to come back for more? But these moments were also good times, and I knew that the feelings would pass. Then I could excuse them as morbid pessimistic fears that had no sound basis. ‘Looks like we are in for another storm,’ Simon said.

He had been quietly examining the North Ridge, our line of descent, which was rapidly being obscured by massed clouds rolling up the East Face and tumbling out over on to the west side. Even now I could see little of the ridge, and the glacier, up which we had made our approach would be completely £’,’ covered within the hour. The ridge began where we had left our sacks and rose to a subsidiary summit before twisting back on itself and curling down into the clouds. I saw snatches of frighteningly steep razor-edges through cloud gaps, and some dangerously corniced sections, the East Face dropping away to the right in a continuous flank of tortured flutings. We would be unable to traverse below the corniced ridge at a safe distance. The flutings looked impassable. ‘Jesus! It looks hairy.’

‘Yeah. Better get our skates on. If we move quickly we can traverse under that summit and then rejoin the ridge further down. In fact, I don’t think we’ll even have an hour.’

Simon held out his hand, and the first snowflakes drifted down lazily on to his glove. We returned to the sacks and then set off to circle around the minor summit. Simon led the way. We moved roped together, with coils of rope in hand in case of a fall. It was the fastest way and, with the deep powder snow hampering our progress, it was our only chance of getting past the minor summit in reasonable visibility. If Simon fell I hoped to have time enough to get my axe buried; though I doubted whether the axe would find any purchase in the loose snow.

The clouds closed in on us after half an hour, when we were on the east flank of the second summit. Ten minutes later we were lost in the white-out. There was no wind, and the snow fell silently in large heavy flakes. It was about two-thirty and we knew it would snow until late evening. We stood in silence, staring around us, trying to make out where we were.

‘I think we should head down.’

‘I don’t know…no, not down. We must keep in touch with the ridge. Didn’t you see those flutings on this side. We’d never get back up again.’

‘Have we got past that second summit?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘I can’t see anything up there.’

The snow and cloud merged into a uniform blank whiteness. I could see no difference between snow and sky further than five feet from me.

‘Wish we had a compass.’

As I spoke I noticed a lightening in the cloud above us. The sun, shining weakly through the murk, cast the faintest of shadows on the ridge 100 feet above us, but before I had a chance to tell Simon, it was gone.

‘I’ve just seen the ridge.’

‘Where?’

‘Straight above us. Can’t see a thing now, but I definitely saw it.’

‘Right, I’ll climb up and find it. If you stay here you’ll have better luck stopping me if I don’t see the edge of the ridge in time.’

He set off, and after a short time I had only the ropes moving through my hands to show me he was there. The snow fall was getting heavier. I felt the first twinges of anxiety. This ridge had turned out to be a lot more serious than we had ever imagined while our attention had been focused on the route up the West Face. I was about to call out to Simon and ask if he could see anything, but the words died on my lips as the ropes suddenly whipped out through my gloves. At the same time a deep, heavy explosion of sound echoed through the clouds. The ropes ran unchecked through my wet icy gloves for a few feet then tugged sharply at my harness, pulling me chest-first into the snow slope. The roaring died away.

I knew at once what had happened. Simon must have fallen through the corniced ridge, yet the volume of sound suggested something more like a serac avalanche. I waited. The ropes remained taut with his body weight.

‘Simon!’ I yelled. ‘You okay?’

There was no answer. I decided to wait before attempting to move up towards the ridge. If he was hanging over the west side I reckoned it would be some time before he sorted himself out and managed to regain the ridge. After about fifteen minutes I heard Simon shouting unintelligibly. The weight had come off the rope, and I climbed towards him until I could make out what he was saying.

‘I’ve found the ridge!’

I had gathered that, and laughed nervously. He had indeed found a lot more of the ridge than he had bargained for. I stopped grinning when I reached him. He was standing shakily just below the crest. ‘I thought I’d had it there,’ he muttered, suddenly sitting down heavily in the snow as if his legs had failed him. ‘Bloody hell…that was it! The whole bloody thing fell off. God!’

He shook his head as if trying to dislodge what he had just seen. When the fright eased, and his body stopped pumping adrenalin, he looked back at the edge of the ridge, and quietly told me what had happened:

‘I never saw the ridge. I just glimpsed an edge of it far away to the left. There was no warning. No crack. One minute I was climbing, the next I was falling. It must have broken away forty feet back from the edge. It broke behind me, I think; or under my feet. Either way it took me down instantly. It was so fast! I had no time to think. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, except that I was falling.’

‘I’ll bet!’ I looked at the drop of the face behind him as he bowed his head and breathed hard, one hand on his thigh trying to stop the tell-tale tremor in his leg.

‘I was tumbling all over the place and everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. I forgot I was tied to the rope. The noise and the falling—it just stopped me understanding anything. I can remember seeing all these huge blocks of snow falling with me, they fell at the same speed at first, and I thought “this is it”. They were massive. Ten—…twenty-foot-square chunks.’ He was calmer now, but I shivered at the thought of what would have happened if I had moved up with him—it would have taken both of us.

‘Then I felt the rope at my waist, but I thought it would just come down with me. I wasn’t stopping, and all the blocks were smashing against me, flipping me over.’

He paused again, then continued: ‘It was much lighter below me, and the blocks tumbled away from me down an enormous drop of space, spinning and breaking up. I kept getting glimpses of this as the snow walloped into me and spun me round…Perhaps I wasn’t falling by then, but all the thumping and spinning made it feel as if I was. It seemed to be going on and on and on…I wasn’t scared then, just totally confused and numb. As if real time was standing still and there was no longer time to be frightened.’

When he did finally stop, he was hanging in space, and could see over to his left the ridge still peeling away. The cloud on the east side blocked the view slightly, but great blocks of snow were falling from the cloud and went crashing down the face below, as if the ridge was breaking away from him.

‘At first I was so disoriented I wasn’t sure whether I was safe or not. I had to think it out before I realised that you had held my fall. The drop below me was horrific. I could see right down the West Face, 4,500 feet, clear all the way to the glacier. I was in a panic for a while. The huge drop had appeared so suddenly beneath me, and I was hanging thirty feet below the ridge line, not touching the slope. The headwall of the West Face was directly beneath me. I could see our route up the icefield!’

‘If that cornice had come down we would just have disappeared without trace,’ I ventured. ‘How did you get back?’

‘Well, I tried to get back on to the ridge, and it turned out to be one hell of a struggle. The breakline left by the cornice was vertical snow and nearly thirty feet high. I didn’t know if what was left after the collapse was safe. When I finally got up I heard you shouting from down on the East Face and I was nearly too tired to answer. I still couldn’t see an end to the fresh break-line on the ridge. It seemed close to 200 feet. Funny how the visibility cleared as soon as I fell. Five minutes later and I would have seen the danger.’

We were now faced with a very dangerous ridge which, although it had collapsed, was no safer as a result. We could see secondary fracture lines in the snow just back from the edge, and one particular fracture ran parallel to and only four feet away from the crest for as far as we could see.

On the Edge

There was no question of traversing lower down on the East Face for this was a continuous series of large flutings running down into the clouds which had closed over the void again several hundred feet below us. It had stopped snowing. The flutings would be impossibly slow and dangerous to climb across, and to descend lower would see us lost in the white-out conditions below the cloud. There were few choices left open to us. Simon stood up and began moving gingerly along the crest five feet from the edge, along the continual crack-line running away from us. I moved further down the East Face to wait until he had taken out all the slack rope. At least then I could stop him if the ridge broke away again, but eventually I would have to join him, and we would move together along the ridge.

As I climbed up to rejoin his tracks it occurred to me that I had felt a moment of anxiety only minutes before Simon had fallen. I had noticed this in the past and always wondered about it. There had been no good reason for the sudden stab of worry. We had been on the mountain for over fifty hours and perhaps had become attuned to potential threats; so much so that I had sensed something would happen without understanding quite what it would be. I didn’t like this irrational theory, since anxiety had returned with a vengeance. I could see that Simon had also tensed up. The descent was already far more serious than we had reckoned.