Touching the Void (10 page)

‘Do you think you can hold my weight in this snow?’ I asked.

We had no snow stakes left. If Simon took my weight on the rope, he would have to do so standing on the loose open slope with no anchors.

‘If we dig a big bucket seat I should be able to hold you. If it starts to collapse I can always shout, and you can take your weight off.’

‘Okay. It would be quicker if you lowered me on two ropes tied together.’

He nodded in agreement. Already he had begun to dig out his belay seat. I grabbed the two ropes, knotted them together and tied myself into the free end. The other end was already attached to Simon’s harness. In effect we were now roped together with one 300-foot line, which would halve the time spent digging belay seats and double the distance lowered. Simon could control the speed of my descent by using a belay plate, and so reduce any sudden jerks of weight and avoid having the rope run away from him if he couldn’t get a grip on it with his frozen mitts. The one problem was the knot joining the two ropes. The only way to get it past the belay plate would be by disconnecting the rope from the plate and then reconnecting it with the knot on the other side. This would be possible only if I stood up and took my weight off the rope. I thanked my stars that I hadn’t broken both legs.

‘Okay. You ready?’

Simon was seated in the deep hole he had dug in the slope, with his legs braced hard into the snow. He held the belay plate locked off with the rope to me taut between us.

‘Yes. Now take it steady. If anything slips, yell.’

‘Don’t worry, I will. If you can’t hear me when the knot comes up, I’ll tug the ropes three times.’ ‘Right.’

I lay on my chest immediately beneath Simon, and edged down until all my weight was on the rope. Initially I couldn’t commit myself to letting my feet hang free of the snow. If the seat crumbled straight away we would be falling instantaneously. Simon nodded at me and grinned. Encouraged by his confidence I lifted my feet and began to slide down. It worked!

He let the rope out smoothly in a steady descent. I lay against the snow holding an axe in each hand ready to dig them in the moment I felt a fall begin. Occasionally the crampons on my right boot snagged in the snow and jarred my leg. I tried not to cry out but failed. I didn’t want Simon to stop. In a surprisingly short time he did stop. I looked up and saw that he had receded far from me, and I could make out only his head and shoulders leaning out from the seat in the snow. He shouted something but I couldn’t make it out until three sharp tugs explained it. After the endless time traversing the rise I was astounded at the speed at which I had descended 150 feet. Astounded and pleased as punch, I wanted to giggle. In so short a time my mood had swung from despair to wild optimism, and death rushed back to being a vague possibility rather than the inevitable fact. The rope went slack as I hopped up on to my good leg. I was acutely aware that while Simon was changing the knot over we were at our most vulnerable. If I fell, I would drop a whole rope’s length before it came tight on to him, and he would be whipped off the mountain by the impact. I dug my axes in and stayed motionless. I could see the col below and to my right, already a lot closer. More tugs on the rope and I carefully leant my body down the slope as the second half of the lower began. I waved up at the distant red and blue dot above me and saw him stand up out of the seat. He turned and faced into the slope and began kicking his feet into the snow. The rope curled down past me. Simon was on his way down. I turned and started to excavate another seat. I dug deep into the slope, making a hole that he could sit completely inside. I curved the back wall and the floor so that it rose up to the lip of the hole. When satisfied, I looked back up to see Simon back-climbing quickly towards me.

The next lowering was much quicker. We had adopted an efficient system. One shadow lay over our building optimism—the weather. It had deteriorated rapidly, clouds flitting across the col, and a great mass of cloud boiling up in the east. The wind was increasing steadily, blowing powder snow across the slope. I could see plumes of snow streaming horizontally out over the West Face. As the wind grew, so the temperature dropped. I could feel it burning into my face, numbing my chin and nose. My fingers began to freeze.

Simon joined me at the end of the second lowering. We were almost level with the col but there was a horizontal traverse to be made to get to its edge.

‘I’ll go ahead and make a trench.’

He didn’t wait for an answer, and I felt exposed as I watched him move away from me. It looked a long way to the col. I wondered whether to unrope. I didn’t want to, even though logic told me the rope wouldn’t save me now. If I fell I would take Simon with me, but I couldn’t bring myself to dispense with the comforting reassurance of the rope. I glanced at Simon. I couldn’t believe it! He had reached the col yet he was only about eighty feet from me. The late-afternoon light had disguised the distance.

‘Come on!’ he shouted above the wind. ‘I’ve got the rope.’

There was a gentle tug at my waist. He had taken in the remaining slack and intended belaying me. I thought that he meant to jump down the west side if I fell. There was no other way of stopping me. I hobbled sideways and nearly lost balance as I snagged my foot. Something gristly twisted in my knee, and the shock had me sobbing. It eased away and I swore at myself for not concentrating. The crabbed sideways pattern of movement which I had tried before took over once more. When I couldn’t swing my leg across I reached down and hefted it along the trench Simon had forged, and then returned to my patterns. The leg had become inanimate, a weighty useless object. If it got in my way, or pained me, I cursed it and hefted it aside as if it were a chair I had tripped over. The col was exposed and windy, but for the first time we could see clearly down the west flank of the mountain. Directly beneath us the glacier we had walked up five days ago curved away towards the moraines and crevasses which led to base camp, nearly 3,000 feet below us. It would take many long lowerings, but it was all downhill, and we had lost the sense of hopelessness that had invaded us at the ice cliff. Reaching the col had been crucial. If there had been any steep ground between the cliff and the col we would never have got past it.

‘What time is it?’ Simon asked.

‘Just gone four. We don’t have much time, do we?’

I could see him weighing up the possibilities. The face below the col was running with spindrift, and the cloud buildup was nearly complete. It was hard to judge whether it had started snowing because of the powder being swept against us by the wind. We hadn’t sat on the col for very long, yet already I was numb with cold. I wanted to carry on down but it was Simon’s decision. I waited for him to make up his mind.

‘I think we should keep going,’ he said at last. ‘Will you be all right?’

‘Yes. Let’s go. I’m freezing.’

‘Me too. My hands have gone again.’

‘We could snow-hole if you like.’

‘No. We won’t reach the glacier in the light, but it’s a clear slope down. Better to lose height.’ ‘Right. I don’t like the look of this weather.’ ‘That’s what worries me. Okay, I’ll lower you from here. We should go down further to the right but I don’t think you will be able to make it diagonally. We’ll just have to take our chances straight down.’

I slid off the crest of the ridge and down the West Face. Simon stood back from the edge, bracing himself against my weight. The first of many powder avalanches rushed over me, tugging me down. I slid faster, and shouted to Simon to slow down, but he couldn’t hear me.

The Final Choice

I dug the bucket seat with frantic and nervous haste. The first lowering 300 feet down from the col had worried me. It had been quite impossible to descend in a diagonal line to the right. Gravity had turned me into a dead weight and no amount of scrabbling against the snow with ice axes had prevented a plumb vertical descent.

The conditions on the face were markedly different from those on the slopes above the col. Simon let me slide faster than I had expected and, despite my cries of alarm and pain, he had kept the pace of descent going. I stopped shouting to him after fifty feet. The rising wind and continuous spindrift avalanches drowned out all communications. Instead I concentrated on keeping my leg clear of the snow. It was an impossible task. Despite lying on my good leg, the crampons on the right boot snagged in the snow as the weight of my body pushed down. Each abrupt jerk caused searing pain in my knee. I sobbed and gasped, swore at the snow and the cold, and most of all at Simon. At the change-over point, I hopped on to my left leg after feeling the tugs on the rope and hammering the axe shafts into the snow, bent over them, trying to think the pain away. It ebbed slowly, leaving a dreadful throbbing ache and a leaden tiredness.

The tugs came again far too soon, and carelessly I slumped against the rope and let myself go. The drop went on until I could bear it no longer, yet there was nothing that I could do to bring the agony to an end. Howling and screaming for Simon to stop achieved nothing; the blame had to lie somewhere, so I swore Simon’s character to the devil. I kept thinking the rope must come to an end, that I would stop at any moment, but it seemed to have doubled in length.

The face here was much steeper than above the col, steep enough to frighten me, and make me think that Simon was barely in control. I couldn’t ignore the thought of his seat collapsing and tensed up. I waited for the instant swooping acceleration that would tell me Simon had been pulled down, and that we were dying. It didn’t happen.

The terrible sliding stopped, and I hung silently against the slope. Three faint tugs trembled the taut rope, and I hopped up on to my leg. A wave of nausea and pain swept over me. I was glad of the freezing blasts of snow biting into my face. My head cleared as I waited for the burning to subside from my knee. Several times I had felt it twist sideways when my boot snagged, and each time the movement was unnatural. There would be a flare of agony as the knee kinked back, and parts within the joint seemed to shear past each other with a sickening gristly crunch. I had barely ceased sobbing before my boot snagged again. At the end my leg shook uncontrollably. I tried to stop it shaking, but the harder I tried, the more it shook. I pressed my face into the snow, gritted my teeth, and waited. At last it eased.

Simon had already started to climb down and the slack rope coiled past me as he descended. I looked up but failed to make out where he was. A plume of snow boiled down, hugging the slope. I could see nothing through it. If anything, the spindrift was worse than before, and that could only mean that it had begun snowing heavily. Below me the view was equally limited. I began digging Simon’s belay seat. It was warming work and distracted attention from my knee. When I looked up again Simon could be seen descending quickly.

‘At this rate we should be down by nine o’clock,’ he said cheerfully.

‘I hope so.’ I said no more. It wouldn’t help to harp on about how I felt.

‘Right, let’s do it again.’ He had seated himself in the hole and had the ropes ready for another lowering.

‘You’re not hanging around, are you?’

‘Nothing to wait for. Come on.’

He was still grinning, and his confidence was infectious. Who said one man can’t rescue another, I thought. We had changed from climbing to rescue, and the partnership had worked just as effectively. We hadn’t dwelt on the accident. There had been an element of uncertainty at first, but as soon as we had started to act positively everything had come together.

‘Okay, ready when you are,’ I said, lying on my side again. ‘Slow down a bit this time. You’ll have my leg off otherwise.’

He didn’t seem to hear me for I went down at an even faster pace than before, and the hammering torture began again with a vengeance. My optimism evaporated. I could think of nothing but enduring until the change-over. It came after an age, but the brief respite was too short, and before the agony had eased I was sliding down again.

I pressed my hands against the snow, vainly trying to lift my leg away from the surface. The axes dangled from their loops around my waist and my hands froze. My leg snagged. There was nothing I could do. The muscles had seized up. I tried and tried again to lift it clear of the snow, but it had fused into lumpy dead-weight. I clenched my thigh muscles in an attempt to lift it clear, but nothing happened. It was no longer a part of me. It obeyed no commands, and dangled inert and useless. It snagged, and snagged again, twisted, kinked, and caused every sort of agony, until I gave up trying and lay limp against the moving snow, sobbing. The lowering continued. I forgot about it ending, and gave myself up to the pain. It swamped round my knee and ran up my thigh, infusing all my conscious thoughts with its heat. It pitched higher with every jolt, insisting on attention, becoming something endowed with its own individuality until I could hear its message clearly—‘I’m hurt. I’m damaged. Rest me, leave me be!’

The movement stopped abruptly. Three tugs tremored down. I stood up, shaking. I tried to grab the axe to begin digging the next bucket seat but couldn’t grip the shaft. When I had made it stay in my mitt, it flopped from side to side. I tried picking up the hammer, with the same result. I tugged at my right mitt but couldn’t hold it tight enough to get it off and eventually ripped it free with my teeth. The blue thermal gloves stayed on my hand, ice frosted on to the fabric. Even through the gloves I could see how wooden my fingers had become. They moved stiffly and all together, and refused to curl into a fist.

Spindrift poured down the surface of the slope, filling the mitt which hung from its loop on my wrist while I held my hand under my armpit inside my jacket. The searing pain of returning blood was all I could think about. Even the mushy agony in my lower leg waned before this frightful burning heat in my fingers. When it eased, I emptied my mitt, put the gloved hand back into it, and repeated the process with the other hand.

Simon came down before I had half finished digging his belay seat. He waited silently, head bowed. When I looked at him I saw that he had both hands in his armpits.