Survivor: The Autobiography (15 page)

At the base camp – about 15,800 feet – we met four other Ecuadorians – all very youthful, and associates of the
Neuvos Horizontes
organization, who on hearing of our plan to spend the night on the crater-lip of the volcano decided that opportunity was too good to be missed. This decision was frightening; we tried hard to dissuade them for there was a good chance of them freezing solid before morning could come again. They had only one tent – too awkward to carry up to the summit, and there were then – that auspicious evening – still four of them.

‘What will you do then – when you get up there?’ we asked.

‘We will dig ourselves foxholes and curl up in our sleeping-bags.’

‘You won’t last the night, you won’t wake in the morning. It’s your responsibility; we’ll have nothing to do with it.’

Next morning at eight o’clock we set out in two parties, on two separate ropes. My own party carried only emergency equipment – a little two-man tent, which one enters on all fours through a hole in the side; some preserved fruit, a thermos of coffee, chocolate biscuits and barley sugar. The other four had thin sleeping-bags and iron rations.

For the first half-hour after leaving camp climbing was of the scrambling nature, amounting to no more than a breathless trudge over loose, volcanic shale. The first moment came when we arrived at the snow-line – here both parties solemnly sat on an outcrop of rock and started getting out crampons – ice-spikes – and ropes. This was frightening, for neither of these articles had to my conscious knowledge graced either my feet or waist.

Edmundo led, with myself in the centre and Pépé in the rear. We climbed cautiously along a traverse in steady relays, Edmundo employing his ice-axe with dexterous precision to cut steps for those behind by which we made the slow ascent.

With infinite care he would cut steps ahead of him, climbing sometimes thirty feet at a time while Pépé and I would pay out the rope – I was not good at this and would frequently hold up progress by getting it entangled around the spikes in my crampons. When this happened I perspired with frantic embarrassment and that in its turn meant that moisture obscured my spectacles and goggles – and before we continued I had to take them off and wipe them both. This happened many times.

When Edmundo had proceeded about ten yards he would drive his ice-axe into the snow, belay the rope around it and again around his body for double security and then take the strain while I climbed up the steps towards him. Reaching him I would belay and he (Edmundo) would proceed upwards for another thirty feet hacking out further ice-steps until he would belay once more to allow Pépé to join me. Then the manoeuvre would be repeated all over again and in this way we painstakingly ascended the dome of the world’s highest volcano. It was very tiring for Edmundo.

Although it was toilsome work, it was also dangerous, for we all knew that one moment’s relaxation or carelessness might plunge all three of us a thousand feet headlong below. I was just beginning to properly understand what mountaineering meant.

We had been climbing in this manner for perhaps half an hour when suddenly there was a cry from the party behind. Turning, I expected to witness someone falling. But no! – they were all on their feet. Pépé shouted a question across the intervening furrow between the two parties – his voice sounded strangely sinister in the silence of the Andean mountain air. A very few seconds later a voice replied, ‘Snow blindness’, and the next moment two of them – one leading the other – were taking the first steps down towards the Base camp. Now there were two. The hand of Providence must have been upon us, for if this incident had not occurred when and where it did – this account would not have been written. But we did not then know what the future held.

We watched the two going slowly down for a few minutes then we turned and faced what would lie ahead. Now, as we started again, my leg muscles began to ache intolerably and I thought I could never go on. But I did, I did . . .

At about 18,000 feet we came upon the first of the two crevassed areas – most dangerous part of the climb.

The first crevasse loomed up ahead – a six-foot fissure which doubtless went down into unimaginable depths.

We halted. Pépé drove his ice-axe hard into the frozen snow, tested it, hitched the rope around it, and took the strain. A second later Edmundo had leapt across the gap – the soft vibration of his landing on the far side caused the snow overhangs at the treacherous and uneven edge to crumble and fall in little sparkling lumps into the crevasse. It was fascinating. Then came my turn. I waited while Edmundo had me belayed on his side. I was trembling – as he looked up from his work and nodded. I jumped. A leap of six feet is nothing at sea-level, it’s an exertion at 18,000 feet with crampons encrusted with frozen snow to weight one’s feet. I had never jumped a crevasse before. All across, we struggled on again, placing our feet carefully in the steps Edmundo cut, with such toil, ahead; the temperature was below zero, the wind was rising, the weather worsening. Where the slightest slip meant the loss of life, we crawled warily.

At this stage I called for very frequent rests for my lungs heaved like the bellows of the hearth, and my heart, wholly unaccustomed to extreme elevation, thundered, like an express train entering a long tunnel, my legs ached intolerably, as if I had a chronic fever. Edmundo and Pépé were very patient – but I sensed, rather than saw, through their dark goggles that they were worried – for time was running out, and it was absolutely essential we gain the crater before darkness came. I wondered if I would stick it out, but I had to – these men were risking their lives at my invitation, I could not let them down now.

Then suddenly, as so often happens when one is at the end of one’s tether, something happened. Edmundo had come to a halt – frozen in his steps like a pointer in the snow. His experienced eyes had detected an unusual darker patch in the snow ahead which showed where frozen snow had formed a flimsy treacherous snow-bridge across the depths of a crevasse. To put foot on that bridge would have invited disaster. Again we jumped.

Now the snow was getting deeper, often above our thighs. The wind was still mounting; it moaned now. I wondered what it would be like on the crater, for down here it was almost the force of a gale as it drove frozen particles of snow into the uncovered parts of our faces like the points of a thousand pine-needles. The protective cream with which I had smothered every unprotected part did nothing to alleviate the pain. I had some more in my rucksack, but couldn’t make the effort to do anything that was not automatic. At this point I believe all three of us were feeling the strain, resting every few yards, climbing up and up in a series of traverses, like an ambitious cyclist up a very steep gradient, tacking three or four yards one way then three or four back the other. So sheer was the climb that it was impossible to take it in a straight line. Our rate of ascent must have been well under 500 feet an hour – slower than that when the snow deepened.

Later the all-encompassing darkness began to close down upon us. The gale, still rising, whipped up the snow from the face of the mountain in a fury blizzard, blotting out everything ahead.

Edmundo was himself now stopping frequently – lying like a waif in the snow smitten with the unpredictable
soroche
(mountain sickness) that made him vomit continuously. Bravely he insisted on retaining the first place on the rope. But it was a mistake for isolated in his world of sickness he went off the course and all sense of direction left us. This was really my fault, for it was I who had insisted on frequent stops which initially had wasted the precious hours of light – now we were paying for my mistake.

I staggered on blindly wherever Edmundo was leading – in a world of gloom, wind and drifting snow that to me was very sinister. All my extremities were frozen numb, they somehow seemed to obey like robots. I thought my face was going to be marked, horribly, for life.

We were all near to exhaustion, struggling like automatons, our breath coming in short, deep gasps as the altitude increased. But we had to go forward. To stop and rest meant collapse, dying of exposure in the white graves our warm bodies would imprint for themselves too easily in the ever-deepening snow. I did not know how the others felt but I was now desperately alarmed – grateful for the darkness as it withheld the sight of my tears from the eyes of Pépé – Edmundo would not have noticed, he was too ill. My one desire was to sit and never to rise; I wanted to leave my bones where we were, but I lacked the courage. Fear, coupled with the encouragements of Pépé, kept me going. Pépé was wonderful.

Suddenly there was a shout of triumph from Edmundo. Through a gap in the curtain of the blizzard he caught sight, momentarily, of the craggy outlines of the crater-lip itself. A wave of extreme jubilation swept through the party. Cold, fatigue, irritation were temporarily forgotten. We almost ran those last few yards . . . or what seemed at first to be the last few yards.

But our run quickly became a walk again, the walk a drunken stagger. Another five . . . ten . . . fifteen minutes passed, and still the elusive silhouette of what we so longingly sought eluded us – or was it that our eyes could not properly focus?

Again I fell over the frozen lengths of rope to lie spreadeagled, hopelessly, in the deep snow. I knew I had to make the effort to get up . . . to get up and go on . . . to get up and go on. I repeated the simple phrase over and over again for my brain had become irrevocably fixed in one groove and the gramophone kept playing . . . ‘Get up and go on,’ with unbearable monotony. I got to my feet and was just starting again when through the howling gale another shout came from Edmundo. He had reached the crater of Cotopaxi.

We struggled to join him on the marginal strip of loose, black lava, some thirty feet wide, where there was no snow.

Now, with the external side of the volcano no longer providing shelter, we caught the full force of the gale that came from the east.

Pépé and I struggled to pitch the two-man tent among the boulders and stones on the black patch of lava which separated the unpredictable depths of the volcano from the icy, snow-covered slope we had so painfully ascended.

The only way we could erect the tent was by Pépé crawling in through the hole – like a participant in an obstacle race – and pushing up the hollow aluminium tent-pole from within. While outside, I, at the same moment, pulled out the base flaps to their full extent and hammered in the skewer-like stays. Poor Edmundo, too ill to take any active part, watched fascinated as though in the throes of a nightmare.

Somehow we got the fragile-looking shelter up at a ridiculously uneven angle, about five feet below the edge of the volcano, just sufficient to allow the worst of the raging wind to pass over the conical top of the canvas. Even so the pressure on the ground pegs was exacting, and before entering I dragged some heavy boulders into position to weight down the edges of the tent as I considered it probable we might find ourselves halfway down the way we had come before dawn. This was a great work at 19,650 feet, and once the boulders were in place, the hitherto two-man tent was reduced internally to a one-man dimension. Nevertheless we all three managed to ease ourselves inside together with our rucksacks, rope, crampons, etc. We scarcely expected sleep. Edmundo, ill with mountain sickness, lay in an inert heap. Pépé and I huddled close together, cramped, cold, and exhausted. The only food we had was a small carton of dried prunes – the ascent had taken much longer than anticipated and we had eaten everything else. We had no stove to ‘fabricate water’.

Meanwhile the remaining two of the other party had also reached the crater, and even now we could hear sounds like a blacksmith’s forge some ten yards away. They were digging their graves with vigour, their ice-axes crunching into the frozen, stony lava. Would they be able to dig deep enough holes? I wondered.

Some ten minutes after the noises of human endeavour had altogether ceased – there was a cry – almost theatrical in its tragic intensity, brought to us as it was through the moaning gale. I nudged Pépé.

‘They’ll freeze to death out there,’ I said. Whereupon I untied the flap by which we entered our tent and shouted. A minute or so passed before a wretched apparition dragging a sleeping-bag after him appeared in the doorway. Unceremoniously Pépé and I helped him in; he was almost on the verge of collapse. He was only eighteen and, I noticed, had no gloves. Why did he come? A few minutes later there was a further cry, and a little later another figure appeared at the entrance – we got him in as well. How we did so I don’t know.

It was then about seven o’clock in the evening and for the next sixteen hours the two-man tent (reduced to one-man in capacity) bulged with five frozen human beings. It was suffocating, yet freezing, and I kept making involuntary little lunges at the roof in quest of oxygen. If I’d had a knife I would have cut a hole and stuck out my nose. Instead I ran my fingers over the cold, moist canvas and applied them to my forehead. It helped for a few short seconds – it was like a self-baptism. But a little later I stood it no longer and dived bodily for the entrance flap, untied it, and ejected my head dartingly like a cobra in the act of striking, but brought it back into the tent as suddenly for outside the cold was equally insupportable. When circulation died in our feet we rubbed each other feverishly; two of us were too ill to bother. Perhaps they were fortunate – rubbing is very painful. We attempted two songs – they died as soon as they came to our lips. Two of us devoured the prunes, one did not want them and the other two did not know, I suppose, we even had them. Oh, the lassitude!

Even when dawn came again and the wind had dropped we could not get out for a blanket of mist enveloped the entire mountain. We had to wait until nearly eleven o’clock before the sun broke through.