Touching the Void (13 page)

Then it stopped as abruptly as it had started. I let the rope slide five feet, thinking furiously. Could I hold the rope with one hand below the knot and change the plate over? I lifted one hand from the rope and stared at it. I couldn’t squeeze it into a fist. I thought of holding the rope locked against the plate by winding it round my thigh and then releasing the plate from my harness. Stupid idea! I couldn’t hold Joe’s weight with my hands alone. If I released the plate, 150 feet of free rope would run unstoppable through my hands, and then it would rip me clear off the mountain. It had been nearly an hour since Joe had gone over the drop. I was shaking with cold. My grip on the rope kept easing despite my efforts. The rope slowly edged down and the knot pressed against my right fist. I can’t hold it, can’t stop it. The thought overwhelmed me. The snow slides and wind and cold were forgotten. I was being pulled off. The seat moved beneath me, and snow slipped away past my feet. I slipped a few inches. Stamping my feet deep into the slope halted the movement. God! I had to do something!

The knife! The thought came out of nowhere. Of course, the knife. Be quick, come on, get it. The knife was in my sack. It took an age to let go a hand and slip the strap off my shoulder, and then repeat it with the other hand. I braced the rope across my thigh and held on to the plate with my right hand as hard as I could. Fumbling at the catches on the rucksack, I could feel the snow slowly giving way beneath me. Panic threatened to swamp me. I felt in the sack, searching desperately for the knife. My hand closed round something smooth and I pulled it out. The red plastic handle slipped in my mitt and I nearly dropped it. I put it in my lap before tugging my mitt off with my teeth. I had already made the decision. There was no other option left to me. The metal blade stuck to my lips when I opened it with my teeth.

I reached down to the rope and then stopped. The slack rope! Clear the loose rope twisted round my foot! If it tangled it would rip me down with it. I carefully cleared it to one side, and checked that it all lay in the seat away from the belay plate. I reached down again, and this time I touched the blade to the rope.

It needed no pressure. The taut rope exploded at the touch of the blade, and I flew backwards into the seat as the pulling strain vanished. I was shaking.

Leaning back against the snow, I listened to a furious hammering in my temple as I tried to calm my breathing. Snow hissed over me in a torrent. I ignored it as it poured over my face and chest, spurting into the open zip at my neck, and on down below. It kept coming. Washing across me and down after the cut rope, and after Joe.

I was alive, and for the moment that was all I could think about. Where Joe was, or whether he was alive, didn’t concern me in the long silence after the cutting. His weight had gone from me. There was only the wind and the avalanches left to me.

When at last I sat up, the slack rope fell from my hips. One frayed end protruded from the belay plate—he had gone. Had I killed him?—I didn’t answer the thought, though some urging in the back of my mind told me that I had. I felt numb. Freezing cold, and shocked into a numb silence, I stared bleakly into the swirling snow beneath me wondering at what had happened. There was no guilt, not even sorrow. I stared at the faint torch beam cutting through the snow and felt haunted by its emptiness. I was tempted to shout to him, but stifled the cry. It wouldn’t be heard. I could be sure of that. I shivered in the wind as the cold crept up my back. Another avalanche swept over me in the darkness. Alone on a storm-swept avalanching mountain face, and becoming dangerously cold, I was left with no choice but to forget about Joe until the morning.

I stood up and turned into the slope. The belay seat was full of avalanched powder. I started to dig and soon I had excavated a sufficiently large hole to lie half-buried in the slope with only my legs exposed to the storm. I dug automatically while my mind wandered through tortured arguments and asked unanswerable questions, and then I stopped digging and lay still, thinking about the night. Then I dug again. Every few minutes I would shake myself from a mess of thoughts and return to digging, only to find I had drifted off again a few minutes later. It took a long time to complete the cave.

It was a weird night. It felt strange to think so coldly about what had happened, as if I were distancing myself from the events. Occasionally I wondered whether Joe was still alive. I had no idea what he had fallen over. I knew how close we had come to the bottom of the mountain, so it seemed reasonable to hope that he might survive a short fall to the glacier, could even now be digging a snow cave himself. Something made me think this wasn’t the case, and I couldn ‘t evade the urgent feeling that he must be dead or dying. I sensed that something awful was hidden in the powder avalanches swirling madly through the black night below my snow cave. When the cave was finished I struggled into my sleeping bag and blocked the entrance with my rucksack. The wind and the avalanches rushing across the roof could not be heard, and I lay in the silent darkness trying to sleep. Plagued with endless thoughts which turned madly upon themselves in vicious circles, sleep was impossible. I tried to get my mind to settle by looking back on what I had done and thinking it all through. After a while I stopped, having succeeded only in recalling the facts, and they were so starkly real that I could draw no conclusions from them. I wanted to question what I had done. It seemed necessary to prosecute myself, and to prove that I had been wrong.

The result was worse than the vicious circles which had made me think it through. I argued that I was satisfied with myself. I was actually pleased that I had been strong enough to cut the rope. There had been nothing else left to me, and so I had gone ahead with it. I had done it, and done it well. Shit! That takes some doing! A lot of people would have died before getting it together to do that! I was still alive because I had held everything together right up to the last moment. It had been executed calmly. I had even carefully stopped to check that the rope wasn’t going to tangle and pull me down. So that’s why I feel so damned confused! I should feel guilty. I don’t. I did right. But, what of Joe…

Eventually I dozed and spent a few troubled hours lost in sleep between waking hours of thinking. Thinking blind in a dark, storm-swept cave. Thinking because my mind refused to sleep, or because I was so pumped-up on strain and fear and dread. Thinking, Joe’s dead, I know he’s dead, in a monotonous litany, and then not thinking of him as Joe any more, only the weight gone off from my waist so suddenly and violently that I couldn’t fully grasp it all.

As the night lengthened I sank into a dazed confusion, and Joe faded from memory. It was thirst that took his place, and with each awakening I craved water until it governed my every thought. My tongue felt dry and swollen. It stuck to my palate, and no amount of snow crammed into my mouth could kill the thirst. It was nearly twenty-four hours since I had taken a drink. In that time I should have had at least one and a half litres of fluid to make up for the dehydration caused by the altitude. I smelt the water in the snow around me and it maddened me. I dozed into exhausted stupors, only to wake abruptly to an insistent craving for liquid.

It gradually lightened. I saw axe marks on the roof, and the night was over. With the coming of day I thought of what I must do. I knew I wouldn’t succeed. It wasn’t right for me to succeed. I had thought it all through. This was what must happen to me now. I was no longer afraid, and the dread in the night had gone with the dawn. I knew I would attempt it, and I knew it would kill me, but I was going to go through with it. There would be some dignity left to me at least. I had to try my best. It wouldn’t be enough, but I would try.

I dressed like a priest before mass, with solemn careful ceremony. I felt in no hurry to start down and was certain it would be my last day. Filled with a sense of condemnation, I prepared for the day in such a way that it felt as if I were part of an ancient universal ritual, a long-planned ritual which had been born during the dark thought-wracked hours behind me.

I fastened the last strap of my crampons on to my boot, and then stared silently at my gloved hands. The careful preparation had calmed me. My fear had gone and I was quiet. I felt cold and hard. The night had cleaned me out, purging the guilt and the pain. The loneliness since the cutting had also gone. The thirst had eased. I was as ready as I would ever be.

I smashed the roof of the cave with my axe, and stood up into the blinding glare of a perfect day. No avalanches, and no wind. Silent ice mountains gleamed white around me, and the glacier curved gently westwards to the black moraines above base camp. I felt watched. Something in the crescent of summits and ridges looked down on me and waited. I stepped from the wreckage of the cave, and started to climb down. I was about to die; I knew it, and they knew it.

Shadows In the Ice

I lolled on the rope, scarcely able to hold my head up. An awful weariness washed through me, and with it a fervent hope that this endless hanging would soon be over. There was no need for the torture. I wanted with all my heart for it to finish.

The rope jolted down a few inches. How long will you be, Simon? I thought. How long before you join me? It would be soon. I could feel the rope tremble again; wire-tight, it told me the truth as well as any phone call. So! It ends here. Pity! I hope somebody finds us, and knows we climbed the West Face. I don’t want to disappear without trace. They’d never know we did it.

The wind swung me in a gentle circle. I looked at the crevasse beneath me, waiting for me. It was big. Twenty feet wide at least. I guessed that I was hanging fifty feet above it. It stretched along the base of the ice cliff. Below me it was covered with a roof of snow, but to the right it opened out and a dark space yawned there. Bottomless, I thought idly. No. They’re never bottomless. I wonder how deep I will go? To the bottom…to the water at the bottom? God! I hope not!

Another jerk. Above me the rope sawed through the cliff edge, dislodging chunks of crusty ice. I stared at it stretching into the darkness above. Cold had long since won its battle. There was no feeling in my arms and legs. Everything slowed and softened. Thoughts became idle questions, never answered. I accepted that I was to die. There was no alternative. It caused me no dreadful fear. I was numb with cold and felt no pain; so senselessly cold that I craved sleep and cared nothing for the consequences. It would be a dreamless sleep. Reality had become a nightmare, and sleep beckoned insistently; a black hole calling me, pain-free, lost in time, like death. My torch beam died. The cold had killed the batteries. I saw stars in a dark gap above me. Stars, or lights in my head. The storm was over. The stars were good to see. I was glad to see them again. Old friends come back. They seemed far away; further than I’d ever seen them before. And bright: you’d think them gemstones hanging there, floating in the air above. Some moved, little winking moves, on and off, on and off, floating the brightest sparks of light down to me.

Then, what I had waited for pounced on me. The stars went out, and I fell. Like something come alive, the rope lashed violently against my face and I fell silently, endlessly into nothingness, as if dreaming of falling. I fell fast, faster than thought, and my stomach protested at the swooping speed of it. I swept down, and from far above I saw myself falling and felt nothing. No thoughts, and all fears gone away. So this is it!

A whoomphing impact on my back broke the dream, and the snow engulfed me. I felt cold wetness on my cheeks. I wasn’t stopping, and for an instant blinding moment I was frightened. Now, the crevasse! Ahhh…NO!!

The acceleration took me again, mercifully fast, too fast for the scream which died above me…The whitest flashes burst in my eyes as a terrible impact whipped me into stillness. The flashes continued, bursting electric flashes in my eyes as I heard, but never felt, the air rush from my body. Snow followed down on to me, and I registered its soft blows from far away, hearing it scrape over me in a distant disembodied way. Something in my head seemed to pulse and fade, and the flashes came less frequently. The shock had stunned me so that for an immeasurable time I lay numb, hardly conscious of what had happened. As in dreams, time had slowed, and I seemed motionless in the air, unsupported, without mass. I lay still, with open mouth, open eyes staring into blackness, thinking they were closed, and noting every sensation, all the pulsing messages in my body, and did nothing.

I couldn’t breathe. I retched. Nothing. Pressure pain in my chest. Retching, and gagging, trying hard for the air. Nothing. I felt a familiar dull roaring sound of shingles on a beach, and relaxed. I shut my eyes, and gave in to grey fading shadows. My chest spasmed, then heaved out, and the roaring in my head suddenly cleared as cold air flowed in.

I was alive.

A burning, searing agony reached up from my leg. It was bent beneath me. As the burning increased so the sense of living became fact. Heck! I couldn’t be dead and feel that! It kept burning, and I laughed—Alive! Well, fuck me!—and laughed again, a real happy laugh. I laughed through the burning, and kept laughing hard, feeling tears rolling down my face. I couldn’t see what was so damned funny, but I laughed anyway. Crying and laughing at high pitch as something uncurled within me, something tight and twisted in my guts that laughed itself apart and left me. I stopped laughing abruptly. My chest tightened, and the tension took hold again. What stopped me?

I could see nothing. I lay on my side, crumpled strangely. I moved an arm cautiously in an arc. I touched a hard wall. Ice! It was the wall of the crevasse. I continued the search, and suddenly felt my arm drop into space. There was a drop close by me. I stifled the urge to move away from it. Behind me I felt my legs lying against a slope of snow. It also sloped steeply beneath me. I was on a ledge, or a bridge. I wasn’t slipping, but I didn’t know which way to move to make myself safe. Face down in the snow I tried to gather my confused ideas into a plan. What should I do now? Just keep still. That’s it…don’t move…Ah!