Touching the Void (8 page)

Though we moved with exaggerated caution, we couldn’t avoid slipping and falling, only half in control, down the worst sections. I stayed close to the top of the ridge, which kept curling back on itself and dropping suddenly in short steep walls. The possibility of a cornice collapse gradually faded from my mind as I moved, and I became resigned to the helplessness of our situation. The flutings lower down the East Face would almost certainly be a worse proposition. As great a danger as the cornices was the risk of a fall. Any fall requiring a rope to stop it was going to be fatal; neither of us would stand a chance. Yet every time I approached a steep section and was forced to back-climb facing into the snow I usually did so by a combination of falling and climbing. The powder was so insubstantial that, however hard I kicked my legs, I would whoosh down a few feet as soon as I got my weight off my arms. Each sudden heart-stopping slide seemed somehow to halt of its own accord. Where I would stop would be no more solid than where I had fallen from. It wore one’s nerves ragged.

I slipped again, but this time yelped out in fright. The short steep slope I was descending bottomed directly on to the edge of the ridge, which had curved back on itself. I had seen as I turned to face into the slope that a huge powdery cornice bulged out beneath this curve, and falling away below it the West Face plunged thousands of feet down to the glacier. Simon, moving a full rope’s-length behind me, was out of sight and would have no warning; no idea which side I was falling down. I rushed down in a flurry of powder so fast that my yelp came out more as a squeak of alarm than an attempted warning cry. Simon didn’t see the fall, and heard nothing.

Then, just as suddenly, I stopped, with my whole body pressed into the snow, head buried in it, with my arms and legs spreadeagled in a desperate crabbed position. I dared not move. It seemed as if only luck was holding me on to the slope, and feeling the snow moving and sliding down past my stomach and thighs just made me cringe in deeper.

I lifted my head and glanced sideways over my right shoulder. I was on the very edge of the ridge, exactly at the point of the curve. My body was tipped over to the right so that I seemed to be hanging out over the West Face. All my thoughts became locked into not moving. I gasped fast breaths, scared sucks at the air, but I didn’t move. When I looked again I realised that I wasn’t actually off-balance, although the brief glance before had made me think I was. It was like discovering the trick behind an optical illusion, suddenly seeing what you had really been staring at all the time. The curve of the ridge away back to my left, and the glimpse of the bulging cornice under its arc, had confused me so much that I had thought I was leaning over the fall line. In fact I found that my right leg had punctured straight through the cornice and, though my other leg had stopped me, it had also pushed me over sideways. This explained why I felt unbalanced, right side down. I scrabbled and clawed at the snow on my left, trying to pull my weight over to that side, trying to get my right leg back on to the ridge. Eventually I succeeded and moved away from the edge, following the curve of the ridge again.

Simon appeared above me, moving slowly, looking down at his feet all the time. I had moved to a safer place and shouted a warning for him to descend the slope further to the left, and realised as I did so that I was shaking violently. My legs had gone to sudden jelly, quivering, and it took a long while for the reaction to fade. Long enough for me to watch Simon face into the slope and descend it in two footsteps and the inevitable rushing slide. When he turned and followed my steps I could see the tension in his face. The day was neither enjoyable nor funny, and when he reached me the fear was infectious. We chattered out our alarm in quavery voices; quick staccato curses and repeated phrases tumbling out before we calmed.

Disaster

We had left the snow hole at seven thirty, and two and a half hours later I could see that our progress was painfully slow. Since leaving the summit the previous afternoon we had descended no more than 1,000 feet instead of getting all the way down to the glacier in the six hours which we had reckoned. I began to feel impatient. I was tired of this grinding need to concentrate all the time. The mountain had lost its excitement, its novelty, and I wanted to get off it as soon as possible. The air was bitingly cold and the sky cloudless; the sun burnt down in a dazzling glare on the endless snow and ice. As long as we were back on the glacier before the afternoon storms I didn’t care a damn what the weather chose to do.

At last the twisting mayhem of the upper ridge eased, and I could walk upright across the broad level ridge which undulated away in whale-backed humps towards the drop at its northern end. Simon caught up with me as I rested on my sack. We didn’t speak. The morning had already taken its toll, and there was nothing left to say. Looking up at our footsteps weaving an unsteady path down towards us, I vowed silently to be more careful about checking descent routes in future. I shouldered my sack and set off again, with no qualms about being in front now. I had wanted Simon to lead on the last stretch but had been unable to voice my apprehension and feared his response to it more than I feared another sickening fall. Deep snow had built up on the wide, level saddle, and, instead of anxiety swamping my every move I was back to the (frustration of wallowing through powder snow.

I had run out the rope, and Simon was getting up to follow when I stepped into the first crevasse. In a rushing drop, I suddenly found myself standing upright but with my eyes level with the snow. The shallow fissure was filled with powder, so that however hard I thrashed about I seemed to make no upward movement at all. Eventually I managed to haul myself back on to level ground. From a safe distance Simon had watched my struggles with a grin on his I face. I moved farther along the ridge and sank down again I neck-deep in the snow. I yelled and cursed as I clawed my way I back on to the ridge and, by the time I had traversed half-way across the plateau above it, I had fallen into another four small crevasses. However hard I tried, I could not see any tell-tale marks indicating their presence. Simon was following a full rope’s-length behind. Frustration and the mounting exhaustion maddened me to a fury which I knew would be vented on Simon if he came close enough.

Then, crouching beside the hole I had just made, trying to regain my breath, I glanced back and was shocked to see clear through the ridge into the yawning abyss below. Blue-white light gleamed up through the hole from the expanse of the West Face, which I could see looming beneath it. Suddenly it clicked in my brain why I had fallen through so many times. It was all one crevasse, one long fracture line cutting right through the enormous humping cornices that made up the plateau. I moved quickly away to the side and shouted a warning to Simon. The rolling ridge had been so wide and flat it had never occurred to me that we might actually be standing on an overhanging cornice, one as large as the summit cornice, but stretching for several hundred feet. If it had collapsed we would have gone with it.

I kept well back from the edge after that, leaving a healthy margin of fifty feet. Simon had fallen with the smaller cornice collapse when he was forty feet back from the edge. There was no point in taking chances now that the flutings on the east side had eased into a uniformly smooth slope. My legs felt leaden trudging through the deep snow towards the end of the plateau. As I crested the last rise in the ridge and glanced back, I saw Simon hauling himself along in the same head-down, dogtired manner as myself, a full rope’s-length from me, 150 feet away, and I knew he would be out of sight once I began descending the long easy-angled slope ahead.

I had hoped to see the slope run down to the col but was disappointed to find it rising slightly to a minor summit of cornices before dropping steeply down again. Even so, I could see enough of the South Ridge of Yerupaja to know that the col would certainly lie immediately below that next drop, and then we would be at the lowest point on the ridge connecting Yerupaja and Siula Grande. Another half-hour would put us on that col, and it would be easy going from there to the glacier. I perked up.

Starting down, I felt at once the change in angle. It was so much easier than the plod along the saddle, and I would have romped happily down the gentle slope but for the rope tugging insistently at my waist. I had forgotten that Simon would still be wearily following my tracks on the saddle. I had expected to be able to take a direct line to the small rise without encountering any obstacles, and was surprised to find that the slope ended abruptly in an ice cliff. It cut right across my path at right-angles, bisecting the ridge. I approached the edge cautiously and peered over a twenty-fivefoot drop. The slope at its base swept down to the right in a smooth, steeply angled face. Beyond that lay the last rise on the ridge, about 200 feet away. The height of the cliff increased rapidly as it cut away from the ridge. I stood roughly mid-point on this wedge of ice running across the ridge, with its narrow edge abutting the ridge line. I traversed carefully away from the ridge, occasionally looking over the cliff to see if there was any weakness in the wall, which stood thirty-five feet high at its end. I had already discounted the possibility of abseiling past the cliff, for the snow at the top of the cliff was too loose to take an ice stake.

There were two options open to me. Either I could stay on the ridge top or I could continue away from it and hope to by pass the steep section by a wide descending traverse. From where I stood at the end of the cliff I could see that this would be very tiring and risky. We would have to detour in a wide arc down, across, and then back up again, to by-pass the cliff. The initial slope down looked very steep and very unstable. I had had enough of slip-sliding around this ridge, and the empty sweep thousands of feet into the eastern glacier bay below the slope nudged me into decision. If either of us fell we would be on open slopes. We wouldn’t stop. At least on the ridge we had been able to kid ourselves that we could, with luck, jump either side of the apex in the event of a fall.

I retraced my steps, intending to climb down the cliff at the easiest point. I knew this would be impossible near the crest of the ridge since there it was a near-vertical wall of powder snow. I needed to find a weakness in the cliff, a ramp line or a crevasse running down the cliff to give me some purchase on the ice, which appeared solid to within a few yards of the edge of the ridge. At last I saw what I was looking for—a very slight break in the angle of the ice wall. This part of the cliff was still steep, nearly vertical, but not quite. It was about twenty feet high at the break and I felt sure that at this point a few quick moves of reverse climbing would see me past the problem. Crouching down on my knees, I turned my back to the cliff edge and managed to get my axes to bite in deeply. Slowly, I lowered my legs over the cliff until the edge was against my stomach and I could kick my crampons into the ice wall below me. I felt them bite and hold. Removing one axe, I hammered it in again very close to the edge. It held fast and solid. I removed my ice hammer and lowered my chest and shoulders over the edge until I could see the ice wall and swing at it with the hammer. I was hanging on to the ice axe, reaching to my side to place the hammer solidly into the wall with my left hand. I got it to bite after a few blows but wasn’t happy about it and removed it to try again. I wanted it to be perfect before I removed the axe embedded in the lip and lowered myself on to the hammer. As the hammer came out there was a sharp cracking sound and my right hand, gripping the axe, pulled down. The sudden jerk turned me outwards and instantly I was falling. I hit the slope at the base of the cliff before I saw it coming. I was facing into the slope and both knees locked as I struck it. I felt a shattering blow in my knee, felt bones splitting, and screamed. The impact catapulted me over backwards and down the slope of the East Face. I slid, head-first, on my back. The rushing speed of it confused me. I thought of the drop below but felt nothing. Simon would be ripped off the mountain. He couldn’t hold this. I screamed again as I jerked to a sudden violent stop.

Everything was still, silent. My thoughts raced madly. Then pain flooded down my thigh—a fierce burning fire coming down the inside of my thigh, seeming to ball in my groin, building and building until I cried out at it, and my breathing came in ragged gasps. My leg! Oh Jesus. My leg! I hung, head down, on my back, left leg tangled in the rope above me and my right leg hanging slackly to one side. I lifted my head from the snow and stared, up across my chest, at a grotesque distortion in the right knee, twisting the leg into a strange zigzag. I didn’t connect it with the pain which burnt my groin. That had nothing to do with my knee. I kicked my left leg free of the rope and swung round until I was hanging against the snow on my chest, feet down. The pain eased. I kicked my left foot into the slope and stood up.

A wave of nausea surged over me. I pressed my face into the snow, and the sharp cold seemed to calm me. Something terrible, something dark with dread occurred to me, and as I thought about it I felt the dark thought break into panic: ‘I’ve broken my leg, that’s it. I’m dead. Everyone said it…if there’s just two of you a broken ankle could turn into a death sentence…if it’s broken…if…It doesn’t hurt so much, maybe I’ve just ripped something.’

I kicked my right leg against the slope, feeling sure it wasn’t broken. My knee exploded. Bone grated, and the fireball rushed from groin to knee. I screamed. I looked down at the knee and could see it was broken, yet I tried not to believe what I was seeing. It wasn’t just broken, it was ruptured, twisted, crushed, and I could see the kink in the joint and knew what had happened. The impact had driven my lower leg up through the knee joint.

Oddly enough, looking at it seemed to help. I felt detached from it, as if I were making a clinical observation of someone else. I moved the knee gingerly, experimenting with it. I tried to bend it and stopped immediately, gasping at the rush of pain. When it moved I felt a grinding crunch; bone had moved, and a lot more besides. At least it wasn’t an open fracture. I knew this as soon as I tried to move. I could feel no wetness, no blood. I reached down and caressed the knee with my right hand, trying to ignore the stabs of fire, so that I could feel it with enough force to be certain I wasn’t bleeding. It was in one solid piece, but it felt huge, and twisted—and not mine. The pain kept flooding round it, pouring on fire, as if that might cure it then and there.