Touching the Void (7 page)

I moved carefully. I watched the crack-line, checked I had put my feet exactly where Simon’s footsteps were, and continued nervously 150 feet behind Simon, who had his back to me. I might have a chance if I saw him fall in time. I could throw myself down the opposite side of the ridge and expect the ropes to stop us as they sawed through the ridge. He would have little or no warning. He might hear me scream out, or hear the ridge break, but he would have to turn round to see which side I was falling down before he could jump to the safe side. It seemed to me that the most likely accident would involve the whole ridge collapsing, taking us both down in one very long breakaway of snow.

I saw the crack close up, and when I moved past it I breathed a sigh of relief. The ridge was slightly safer at last. Unfortunately it now dropped away steeply and twisted back on itself with each turn, huge cornices bulging out over the West Face. I saw that these difficulties eased further in the distance so I wasn’t surprised when Simon began descending the East Face. He intended to lose enough height to be able to traverse directly across to the easier section and avoid descending the tortured ridge. The easier ground lay a couple of hundred feet below our point on the ridge. I guessed how far we needed to descend before following Simon down.

We hadn’t descended far before I realised how poor the light had become. I checked my watch and was surprised to see that it had gone five o’clock. We had left the summit nearly three and a half hours earlier and yet had made little progress along the ridge. It would be dark in an hour and, to make things more difficult, the storm clouds had boiled over us again and snowflakes were blowing up from the east into our faces. The temperature had also dropped sharply and, with the wind building up, it felt icy cold whenever we stopped.

Simon descended a gully between two flutings. I followed slowly, trying to keep the distance between us by moving only when the ropes moved. I descended into a uniform whiteness, snow and cloud merging into one. After a while I decided that we must have reached a point where we could now traverse horizontally across to the easier ground, but Simon carried on down. I shouted for him to stop, but received only a muffled reply. I yelled louder and the ropes stopped moving through my gloves. Neither of us could understand the other’s shouts, so I moved down to get within earshot. I was alarmed to find that the gully became steeper and I kept slipping. I turned round to face into the slope, but it was still hard to remain in control.

I was close to him when I heard Simon shout again and could hear his query about why we had stopped. At that moment the snow whooshed away from under my feet and I dropped swiftly. I had both axes dug deep into the gully but they didn’t stop me. I screamed a warning, and suddenly bumped heavily against Simon, stopping jammed up against him.

‘Jesus!…I…Oh shit! I thought we’d had it…this is fucking stupid!’

Simon said nothing. I leant face first into the gully and tried to calm down. My heart seemed to be trying to hammer its way out of my chest, and my legs shook weakly. It had been fortunate that I was so close to Simon when I fell, not too far above to have built up enough speed to knock him down.

‘You okay?’ Simon asked.

‘Yes. Scared…that’s all.’

‘Yeah.’

‘We’ve gone far too low.’

‘Oh! I was thinking perhaps we could descend all the way into the eastern glacier bay.’ ‘You’re joking! Bloody hell! I’ve just nearly killed both of us on this bit, and we haven’t a clue what it’s like below us.’

‘But that ridge is crazy. We’ll never get down it tonight.’

‘We’re not getting off this tonight, anyway. For God’s sake, it’s almost dark now. If we rush off down there we’ll be lucky if we ever get off this bloody thing.’

‘Okay…okay, calm down. It was just an idea.’

‘Sorry. I was freaked out. Couldn’t we traverse out sideways from here and get back to the ridge where it drops down?’

‘Okay…you first.’

I sorted out the tangles from my fall and then began digging into the right side of the fluting. An hour and a half later I had managed to cross innumerable flutings and gullies, and Simon was following a rope’s-length behind me. We had covered less than 200 feet, and by then it was snowing hard, bitterly cold and windy. It was also dark and we were having to use our head-torches.

Stumbling through a wall of sugary snow and into another gully, I kicked against rock beneath the snow.

‘Simon!’ I shouted. ‘Stop where you are a while. There’s a small rock wall here. It’s a bit tricky getting round it.’

I decided to place a rock peg in the wall, and then tentatively balance round the obstacle. I succeeded with the rock peg but somehow managed to fall down and round the wall without coming on to the rope. Simon employed an equally basic climbing technique using gravity and body weight, jumping down the wall without being able to see where he would land, but correct in the assumption that, when he did, it would be with such force that he would safely bury himself firmly in the loose snow beyond. The only flaw I could find in his reasoning was that he didn’t know whether his landing would be loose snow or rock! We were too tired and cold by then to care. Once beyond the rock we crossed an open slope of powder, mercifully without flutings. We were heading back up towards where we guessed the ridge would be, and after a couple of rope-lengths found a large cone of snow swept up against a rock wall. We decided to dig a snow cave. Simon’s head-torch kept flickering from a loose or damaged connection. I began digging and soon struck rock. I tried digging parallel with the rock, to make a long narrow cave, but after half an hour gave up. The cave had so many holes in it that it would provide little protection from the wind. It was bitterly cold, and Simon had struggled to repair his head-torch with his bare fingers, fiddling with the copper contacts in the dark. Digging had kept me warm, despite the temperature falling to around the minus twenty mark, but two of Simon’s fingers were frostbitten. He became angry with me when I started to dig another cave. Unjustly, I decided that Simon was behaving petulantly and ignored him. The next site for the cave was marginally better and although I struck rock I managed to build it to fit the two of us. By then Simon had mended the torch but his fingers were beyond rewarming. He was still bristling with anger at my lack of cooperation.

I prepared the meal. There was little enough left. We ate chocolate and dried fruit and drank a lot of fruit juice. By then we had forgotten our tired anger and regained a sense of perspective. I had been as cold and tired as Simon, and had only wanted a cave dug quickly so that we could get into our sleeping bags and make some hot drinks. It had been another very long day. It had started well, and we had been glad to get off the West Face, but the descent had become increasingly difficult and nerve-wracking. Falling over the cornice had shaken both of us, and the strain afterwards had been wearing. We had got angry enough with each other today, and more of the same wouldn’t help. Simon showed me his fingers, which had slowly come back to life. But the index finger on each hand remained white and solid as far back as the first knuckle. So, he had frostbite. I hoped it would not suffer further damage the next day. However, I felt sure that we were close to the end of the difficulties on the ridge, and that we would be able to reach base camp by the following afternoon. We only had enough gas left for two drinks in the morning, but that should be enough. As I settled myself down for sleep I couldn’t shake off the dread feelings I had experienced while traversing the ridge. The image of the two of us falling helplessly down the East Face, still roped together, had all too nearly come true. I shuddered at the prospect of such an end. I knew Simon must have felt the same. The year before he had witnessed just such a terrible accident at the Croz Spur, high in the Mont Blanc range of the French Alps. Two Japanese climbers had fallen to their deaths from close to where he stood, only a short distance from the top of the route.

For three days stormy weather had produced atrocious conditions. The rocks were plastered in verglas, a hard patina of ice covering the holds and filling the cracks. Progress had been painfully slow as each hold was chipped clear, and otherwise easy sections had become desperately extreme climbing. Simon and his partner, Jon Sylvester, had bivouacked twice on the face, and late in the afternoon of that third day, another storm was building up—the temperature plummeting, heavy clouds shrouding them in a world of their own, and the first spindrift powder snow avalanches sweeping down.

The two Japanese climbers had been following them closely. They had bivouacked separately, and there was no communication between the two teams, nor was there any sense of competitiveness or a suggestion that they might join forces. Both parties were coping equally well in the difficult conditions. There were frequent falls, often from the same points. They had watched one another struggle, fall, and try again as they progressed up the face.

When they reached the summit headwall Simon had seen the leading Japanese climber fall outwards and backwards, arms outstretched in surprise. The awesome 2,500-foot plunge, visible through breaks in the cloud, was framed behind him. To his horror, he had then seen the falling leader jerk and twist and, without a sound, pull his partner into the void. Their belay piton had torn free. The two men plunged down, roped together, helpless.

Simon had struggled up to Jon’s stance, which was out of sight of that lower section, and told him what had happened. They stood quietly on the small rock ledge in the gathering storm trying to absorb the enormity of what had just taken place so close to them. There was nothing they could do for the two men, who would never have survived the fall, and the quickest way to get news to the rescue services would be over the summit and down into Italy.

As they resumed the climb they were shocked to hear a ghastly screaming from far below—the chilling sounds of someone in agony, desperately alone and terrified. Looking down, they saw the two climbers sliding down the upper icefield at ever-increasing speed 600 feet below them. They were still roped together, and various scattered items of gear and their rucksacks tumbled alongside them. All Simon could do was to stare helplessly at the two tiny figures racing down the ice. Then they were gone: disappearing over the lip of the icefield, falling out of view into the horrendous drop to the glacier.

By some desperate quirk at least one of the climbers must have survived the initial fall on to the icefield. Somehow they had been stopped, probably with their rope snagged on some rocky projection—but they weren’t saved. It was a cruel twist, both for the victims and for the horrified spectators far above them. Only a short reprieve, five minutes or so, while one of them fought to make himself safe and find some anchor. Badly injured, he had had little chance. Perhaps he had slipped, or the rope had unsnagged: whatever had happened, the outcome was brutally final. Simon and Jon, their confidence shattered, minds numbed by it all, had turned and struggled on up to the summit. It had been so sudden. They hadn’t conversed with the two Japanese, but a mutual understanding and respect had developed. If they had all got down safely, then they would have talked, shared food on the long walk to the valley, met up in a bar in town, perhaps become friends. I could remember seeing Simon walking slowly into the camp-site outside Chamonix when he got back. He was subdued and looked drawn and tired. He had sat numb, repeatedly questioning why his own tumble had been held on the same piton just before the Japanese leader had fallen and ripped it out. A day later he was his normal self again: an experience absorbed, shelved in his memory, understood and accepted, and left at that.

As sleep crept swiftly through me I tried to shake off the thought of how close we had come to the same appalling end as those two Japanese. There would have been no one to watch us, I thought: as if it would have made any difference.

I had the stove burning away cheerfully by my side, and could look beyond it through a hole in the snow cave. The East Face of Yerupaja was framed perfectly in the circular window I had accidentally built into the cave. The early-morning sun etched the ridge lines with shadows, and danced blue shadings down the edges of the flutings on the face. For the first time in the last four days the tense concentration in my body relaxed. The anxious struggles of the previous night had been forgotten, and the memory of how close we had come to falling to our deaths had faded. I gave myself time to enjoy where I was, and to congratulate myself. I craved a cigarette. It was cramped in the snow hole, but infinitely warmer than in the previous one. Simon was still asleep, lying on his side close by me, facing away. His hips and shoulders pressed up against my side, and I could feel his body warmth seeping through my sleeping bag. The close intimacy seemed odd despite how together we had been on the mountain. I moved carefully to avoid waking him. I looked through the round hole window at the East Face and felt myself smiling. I knew it would be a good day.

The gas was all used up in the breakfast routine and there would be no more water until we got down to the lakes below the moraines. I dressed and geared up first, before climbing out of the cave and going over to the first cave I had attempted to dig. Simon was slow getting ready, and it wasn’t until he joined me on the large platform of the collapsed cave that I remembered his frostbite. My good humour vanished, to be replaced by worry, when he showed his fingers to me. One fingertip was blackened and three other fingers were white and wooden in appearance. Funny how my anxiety seemed to have more to do with whether he would be able to carry on climbing after we got down rather than concern for his injuries.

I started up towards the crest of the ridge which was bathed in sunshine half a rope’s-length above me while Simon remained below guarding the ropes. We were both nervous about the possibility of another cornice collapse. When I reached the ridge I was dismayed to see that there was a long section of tortured cornices and knife-edge powder to negotiate. My hope that we might have bypassed it all the day before evaporated. I shouted a warning down to Simon and he agreed to follow me, moving together, once all the rope had run out.