Mountains of the Mind (2 page)

I came to love them, these men: the polar explorers with their sledges, their songs and their soft spot for penguins; and the mountaineers with their pipes, their insouciance and their unfeasible stamina. I loved how inconsistent their rough appearance – their indestructible tweed breetches, their bristling mutton-chops and moustaches, the silk and the bear grease with which they insulated themselves against the cold – seemed to be with their almost fastidious sensitivity to the beauties of the landscapes they moved in. Then there was the combination of aristocratic finickiness (the sixty tins of quail in
foie gras
, the bow-ties and the vintage Montebello champagne that were carried on the 1924 Everest expedition, for example) with enormous hardihood. And their acceptance that a violent death was, if not probable, certainly very possible.

They seemed to me then the ideal travellers: unfazed by adversity and unassuming in person. I longed to be like them. I longed in particular for the thermostat of little Birdie Bowers, Scott’s right-hand man, who, during the voyage south on the
Terra Nova
, washed on deck every morning in a bucket of sea water, and who was able to sleep – to
sleep
– in temperatures down to −30°C.

Above all, I was drawn to those men who travelled to climb the high peaks of the Greater Ranges. So many of them died. I learned the roll-call by heart: Mallory and Irvine on Everest, Mummery on Nanga Parbat, Donkin and Fox on Koshtan-Tau … The list went on and on, through the ranks of the less familiar. The imaginative light the mountaineers cast over me was like that cast by the polar expeditions – the beauty and danger of the landscape, the immensities of space, the utter uselessness of it all – but with high altitudes in place of high latitudes. To be sure these people had their faults. They were beset by the sins of their age: racism, sexism and an unflagging snobbery. And mingled with their bravery was an acute selfishness. But I didn’t notice these traits at the time. All I saw was impossibly brave men stepping out into the brilliant light of the unknown.

The book which undoubtedly made the deepest impression on me was Maurice Herzog’s
Annapurna
, dictated by Herzog from a hospital bed in 1951. He couldn’t write it himself because he had no fingers left. Herzog was the leader of a team of French mountaineers which, in the spring of 1950, travelled to the Nepal Himalaya with the aim of being the first group to summit one of the world’s fourteen 8,000-metre peaks.

After an arduous month of reconnaissance, and with time running out before the arrival of the monsoon, the French team made their
way into the heart of the Annapurna range, a lost world of ice and rock locked off by a ring of the highest mountains on earth. ‘We were in a savage and desolate cirque of mountains never before seen by man,’ wrote Herzog.

Gradually, the team moved up the mountain, establishing successively higher camps. The altitude, the extreme cold and the load-bearing began to take their toll. But as Herzog grew physically weaker, so his conviction strengthened that the summit was attainable. Eventually, on 3 June, he and a climber called Louis Lachenal left Camp V, the highest camp, in a bid for the top of Annapurna.

This final stage of the mountain involved the ascent of a long, curving ramp of ice the team had nicknamed the Sickle glacier, and then of a steep band of rock which protected the summit itself. Aside from this band, the route offered nothing serious in the way of technical obstacles and, keen to save weight, Lachenal and Herzog left their rope behind them.

The weather was immaculate when they departed Camp V, with a pristine sky. Clear skies bring the lowest temperatures, though, and the air was so cold that both men felt their feet freezing inside their boots as they climbed higher. Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.

In his account of the climb, Herzog describes becoming progressively more detached from what was happening to him. The clarity
and thinness of the air, the crystalline beauty of the mountains and the strange painlessness of frostbite conspired to send him into a state of numbed serenity, which made him insensitive to his worsening injuries:

Still in this trance – still immune to pain – he and Lachenal forced a way through the final rock band, and reached the summit:

The pain and the worry came later. While descending the rock-band, Herzog dropped his gloves and, by the time he reached Camp IV, he was barely able to walk. Both his feet and his hands were severely frostbitten. During the desperate retreat down steep ground to Base Camp, he fell and smashed several bones in his already devastated
feet. When he was forced to abseil, the ropes ripped away the flesh of his hands in thick strips.

Once the terrain became less precipitous, it was possible for Herzog to be carried, and he was portaged off the mountain first by piggy-back, then in a basket, then on a sledge and finally on a stretcher. During the retreat, his feet and hands were wrapped and bagged in plastic to save them from further harm. When they reached camp each night, Oudot, the expedition doctor, injected novocaine, spartocamphor and penicillin into Herzog’s femoral and brachial arteries, pushing the long needle in through the left and right flanks of his groin, and the bends of his elbows: an experience so painful that Herzog begged for death in preference. By the time he was off the mountain, Herzog’s feet had turned black and brown; by the time they reached the safety of Gorakpur, Oudot had amputated almost all of his toes and fingers.

I read
Annapurna
three times that summer. It was obvious to me that Herzog had chosen wisely in going for the top, despite the subsequent costs. For what, he and I were agreed, were toes and fingers compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow? If he had died it would still have been worth it. This was the lesson I took away from Herzog’s book: that the finest end of all was to be had on a mountain-top – from death in valleys preserve me, O Lord.

Twelve years after I first read
Annapurna
– twelve years during which I had spent most of my holidays in the mountains – running my finger along the spines in a second-hand bookshop in Scotland, I came across another copy. That night I sat up late and read it through again, and again fell under its spell. Soon afterwards, I booked flights and a climbing partner – an Army friend of mine called Toby Till – for a week in the Alps.

We arrived in Zermatt in early June, hoping to climb the Matterhorn before the summer crowds clogged it up. But the mountain was still thickly armoured with ice: too dangerous for us to attempt. So we drove round to the next valley, where the thaw was supposed to be a little more advanced. Our plan was to camp high overnight, and then the following morning ascend a mountain called the Lagginhorn by its easy south-east ridge. At 4,010 metres, I reflected briefly, the Lagginhorn was almost exactly half the height of Annapurna.

It snowed that night, and I lay awake listening to the heavy flakes falling on to the flysheet of our tent. They clumped together to make dark continents of shadow on the fabric, until the drifts became too heavy for the slope of the tent and slid with a soft hiss down to the ground. In the small hours the snow stopped, but when we unzipped the tent door at 6 a.m. there was an ominous yellowish storm light drizzling through the clouds. We set off apprehensively towards the ridge.

Once we were on it, the ridge turned out to be harder than it looked from below. The difficulty came from the old, rotten snow which was cloaking the ridge to a depth of several feet, together with six inches of fresh fall lying on top of it, uncompacted and sticky. Rotten snow is either granular, like sugar, or forms a crunchy matrix of longer, thinner crystals which have been hollowed out and separated from one another. Either way, it is unstable.

Instead of picking our way cleanly from rock to rock, we had to clamber along the snow, never sure if there was a rock beneath each foot placement, or air. There was no path broken to guide us, either: evidently nobody had been up the ridge since the previous summer. And it was cold, too, violently cold. Where my nose ran, the liquid froze to my face in plump trails. The wind made my eyes water, and the eyelashes on my right eye froze together. I had to separate them by pulling my eyelids apart.

After two hours of work we were nearing the summit, but the angle of the ridge was becoming more severe and our progress had become even slower. I could feel the cold chilling me deep inside. My brain, too, felt slower, more slurred, as though the temperature had congealed my thought processes, turned them viscous. We could have turned back, of course. We carried on.

The final fifty feet of the mountain were very steep indeed, and deep in old, unsound snow. I stopped and assessed the situation. It looked as though the mountain could shuck all the snow off at any moment, like shrugging off a coat. Now and again little avalanches scurried past me. I heard the clatter of a rock-fall on the east face of the mountain.

I was jammed into the snow with the toes of my boots, the slope rearing up in front of my face. I tilted my head right backwards and looked up to the skyline. Clouds were hurtling over the summit, and for a moment it felt as though the mountain was toppling slowly on to me.

I turned back and called down to Toby, twenty feet below me, ‘Do we go on? I don’t like the look of this stuff at all. I reckon the whole lot could go at any time.’

Below Toby, the slope narrowed down to a chute which funnelled out over the precipices on the south face of the ridge. If I slipped, or the snow gave way, I’d slide past Toby, pull him off, and we’d free-fall hundreds of feet down to the glacier.

‘Of course we do, Rob, of course we do,’ Toby called up.

‘Right.’

I had only one ice-axe with me, but the slope was severe enough to need two. Some improvisation was necessary. I transferred the axe to my left hand and made the fingers of my right hand as rigid as possible. I would try to stab them into the snow, using them as an axe-head to give myself purchase. Nervously, I started to climb.

The snow held, the ad hoc axe worked, and suddenly we were there, on a summit the size of a kitchen table, clasping the iron-piping
cross which peeked out of the thick snow on the summit, terrified and elated at once. To every side of us the mountain fell away. It felt as though we were balanced on the pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower. The clouds had cleared and a glossy white light had replaced the murk of the early morning. I spotted the yellow dot of our tent thousands of feet below. Seen from this height, the glacier which we had crossed the previous day to reach the base of the ridge resolved itself into a pattern of shallow pale billows. I could see dozens of tiny meltwater lakes which had formed in the hollows between the billows, winking at me like shields in the sun. Their blueness was startling. To our west, the light of the rising sun poured down the mountain faces of the Mischabel range. The wind was fierce, drumming against the skin of my cheeks until it was numb, and pushing coldly through the gaps in my clothing.