Touching the Void (18 page)

I did not sleep, but lay silent in a half-conscious limbo, slowly adjusting to my new world. I flicked my eyes from view to view without moving my head, registering the familiar landscape as if for the first time. The glacier, like a frozen tongue, curled away to the north and broke into a maze of crevasses on the black moraines at its snout. The moraines tumbled chaotically through a wide rocky valley until they thinned to mud and screes on the bank of a circular lake in the far distance. Another lake flashed sunlight off its surface just beyond the first. Sarapo blocked my view but I knew that the second lake ended at another bank of moraines, and beyond that lay the tents. Slowly it dawned on me that my new world, for all its warmth and beauty, was little better than the crevasse. I was 200 feet above the glacier and six miles from base camp. The tranquility evaporated, and a familiar tension returned. The crevasse had been only a starter! How foolish to have thought that I had done it, that I was safe! I stared at the distant moraines and the glimmers of light from the lakes, and felt crushed. It was too far, too much. I wasn’t strong enough. I had no food, no water, nothing, and again I felt the menace surrounding me. I almost believed that I wasn’t going to be allowed to escape; whatever I did would lead to another barrier, and then another, until I stopped and gave in. The black moraines and glittering lake water in the distance mocked any hopes of escape. I was in a malevolent place; a tangible hostility enclosed me as if the air had been charged with static electricity. This was not the playground we had walked into so long ago. I sat up and looked bitterly at the frayed rope-end which I had carried up from the crevasse. ‘This is getting ridiculous,’ I said aloud quietly, as if afraid something might hear me and know I was beaten.

As I gazed at the distant moraines I knew that I must at least try. I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The thought didn’t alarm me. It seemed reasonable, matter-of-fact. That was how it was. I could aim for something. If I died, well, that wasn’t so surprising, but I wouldn’t have just waited for it to happen. The horror of dying no longer affected me as it had in the crevasse. I now had the chance to confront it and struggle against it. It wasn’t a bleak dark terror any more, just fact, like my broken leg and frostbitten fingers, and I couldn’t be afraid of things like that. My leg would hurt when I fell, and when I couldn’t get up I would die. In a peculiar way it was refreshing to be faced with simple choices. It made me feel sharp and alert, and I looked ahead at the land stretching into distant haze and saw my part in it with a greater clarity and honesty than I had ever experienced before.

I had never been so entirely alone, and although this alarmed me it also gave me strength. An excited tingle ran down my spine. I was committed. The game had taken over, and I could no longer choose to walk away from it. It was ironic to have come here searching out adventure and then find myself involuntarily trapped in a challenge harder than any I had sought. For a while I felt thrilled as adrenalin boosted through me, but it couldn’t drive away the loneliness or shorten the miles of moraines tumbling towards the lakes. The sight of what lay ahead soon killed the excitement. I was abandoned to this awesome and lonely place. It sharpened my perception to see clearly and sharply the facts behind the mass of useless thoughts in my head, and to realise how vital it was just to be there, alive and conscious, and able to change things. There was silence, and snow, and a clear sky empty of life, and me, sitting there, taking it all in, accepting what I must try to achieve. There were no dark forces acting against me. A voice in my head told me that this was true, cutting through the jumble in my mind with its coldly rational sound.

It was as if there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images, and memories and hopes, which I attended to in a daydream state as I set about obeying the orders of the voice. I had to get to the glacier. I would crawl on the glacier, but I didn’t think that far ahead. If my perspectives had sharpened, so too had they narrowed, until I thought only in terms of achieving predetermined aims and no further. Reaching the glacier was my aim. The voice told me exactly how to go about it, and I obeyed while my other mind jumped abstractedly from one idea to another.

I began a one-footed, hopping descent of the face below the crevasse. I headed diagonally to the right in order to by-pass a steep rock buttress which was directly beneath me. Once past it, I saw that the snow ran smoothly down zoo feet to the glacier. I glanced up at the ice cliff above the crevasse. It was a dim past memory, until I spotted the rope hanging down the right-hand side and knew with a sudden pang that Simon had also seen it. The string of colour hanging down the ice dispelled any doubts I might have still clung to. He had survived and seen the crevasse. He hadn’t gone to get help; he had left in the certain knowledge that I was dead. I looked back to my feet and concentrated on hopping.

Mind Games

The snow was deep and the sun softened it. I planted the axes firmly into the snow and leant on them heavily while I executed a hasty downward hop-cum-kick. I had only one chance at making a secure step with the kick. The damaged leg hung slackly above the snow. Despite taking care, I often snagged it, or the sudden downward jolt would pull at the knee joint, making me cry out. When I next looked at the glacier I was pleased to see that it was about eighty feet from where I stood, and that there were no crevasses or bergschrunds between me and the bottom of the slope. The surface of the slope, however, was changing, and I was alarmed to see patches of bare ice a few feet below me. I managed two more hops before the inevitable happened. I knew it would and had prepared myself for it. As soon as I hopped on to the ice my crampons skittered off and I tumbled sideways. I fell head-first on my right side and tobogganed down the slope on my windproof jacket and trousers. My boots rattled over the ice, knocking my legs together, and producing flares of agony to which I responded with eyes closed and gritted teeth. It was short, fast and terribly painful. When I came to a stop in a build-up of snow, I lay absolutely still while the pain throbbed up and down my leg. I tried to get the good leg off the bent-back injured knee, but as soon as I moved a dreadful stabbing made me scream and remain still. I raised myself and looked at my legs. The crampons on my right foot had caught in the gaiters of the good leg, so twisting my knee back in a familiar distorted shape. When I reached forward to free the spikes, fresh pain stabbed through my knee. I couldn’t free them without bending further. Eventually I managed to unhook the spikes with an axe, and I laid my leg gently on to the snow, straightening the knee slowly until the agony faded. I had come to a stop ten feet from a meandering line of footprints. I pulled myself over to them and rested. It was comforting to find the prints. I looked at their shadow marks trailing sinuously across the glacier towards a distant circular-shaped crevasse. The glacier rolled away from me in undulating waves of snow, and between the waves the tracks would disappear, only to reappear on the crest of the next wave. I needed the tracks. From my position, lying on the snow, I had a very limited view ahead and without the tracks I would have little idea of where I was heading. Simon knew the way down, and without a rope he would have taken the safest possible line. All I had to do was follow.

It took some experimentation before I found the best method of crawling. The soft wet snow made it hard to slide. I quickly realised that facing forwards on one knee and both arms was too painful. I lay on my left side, keeping the injured knee out of the way, and through a combination of pulling on axes and shoving with the left leg I made steady progress. The bad leg slid along behind like an unwanted pest. From time to time I stopped to eat snow and rest. Then I would stare vacantly at the huge West Face of Siula Grande above me and listen to the strange thoughts echoing in my head. Then the voice would interrupt the reverie and I would glance guiltily at my watch before starting off again.

The voice, and the watch, urged me into motion whenever the heat from the glacier halted me in a drowsy exhausted daze. It was three o’clock—only three and a half hours of daylight left. I kept moving but soon realised that I was making ponderously slow headway. It didn’t seem to concern me that I was moving like a snail. So long as I obeyed the voice, then I would be all right. I would look ahead and note some features in the waves of snow, then look at my watch, and the voice told me to reach that point in half an hour. I obeyed. Sometimes I found myself slacking, sitting in a daydream, lost to what I was doing, and I would start up guiltily and try to make up time by crawling faster. It never let up. I crawled in a mechanical automatic daze because I was told that I must reach the prescribed spot in time.

As I inched over the sea of snow I listened to other voices that wondered what people were doing in Sheffield and remembered the thatched-cottage pub in Harome where I used to drink before the expedition. I hoped that Ma was praying for me as she always did, and at the memory of her my eyes blurred wetly with hot tears. I sang lyrics of a pop song incessantly to the tune of my crawling, and kept filling my head with countless thoughts and images until I stopped and sat swaying in the heat. Then the voice would tell me I was late, and I would wake with a start and crawl again. I was split in two. A cold clinical side of me assessed everything, decided what to do and made me do it. The rest was madness—a hazy blur of images so vivid and real that I lost myself in their spell. I began to wonder whether I was hallucinating.

A film of weariness enveloped everything. Events passed in slow motion, and thoughts became so confused I lost all sense of time passing. When I stopped I would make an excuse for it, so as not to feel guilty. My frostbitten fingers became the most common excuse. I had to take my mitts and inner gloves off to check that they were not getting worse. Ten minutes later the voice would jolt me back to reality, and I would pull on the glove I had only half managed to remove and tug my mitt over it, and crawl. My hands were always deep in the snow as I crawled, and when they had gone numb I would stop again and stare at them. I meant to massage them, or remove the gloves and heat them in the sun, but I just stared at them blankly until the voice called me. After two hours the circular crevasse was behind me and I had escaped the shadow of Siula Grande. I followed the footprints in a crescent under Yerupaja’s South Face, passing the broken side of a crevasse which thrust out from the glacier snow. It was only fifty feet long but I passed it like a ship passes an iceberg. I drifted slowly by, staring at the bared ice.

I seemed to be drifting with it on a current. It didn’t strike me as odd that I wasn’t overtaking the ice cliff. I gazed at figures in the broken ice of the cliff. I was unsure whether I could really see them. Voices argued with the commanding voice, and decided I was seeing them. They reminded me of an old man’s head I had once seen in a cloud while lying on a beach. My friend couldn’t see it, which had made me angry, because even if I looked away and then back at the cloud I could still see the old man, so it had to be there. It looked like a Renaissance painting, in the Sistine Chapel, where the white-bearded old man pointing his finger from the ceiling was supposed to be God. There was nothing pious about the figures I watched in the ice. Many figures, some half formed, all frozen in bas-relief, stood out starkly from the cliff face. Sun shadows and colours in the ice gave them solidity. All were copulating. I was fascinated, and crawled steadily as I gawped at the obscene figures in the ice. I had seen these figures before as well. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of the carvings inside a Hindu temple. There was no order in the chaos of figures. They stood, or kneeled, or were lying down. Some were upside-down and I had to cock my head to make out what they were doing. It was funny and titillating, like the paintings by Titian of grossly fat nudes that had mesmerised me at fourteen.

A short while later I sat still in the snow with a mitt in my lap, tugging at an inner glove with my teeth. The cliff was no longer in sight. Between seeing the figures and stopping to check my fingers I had no memory of doing anything. One moment I was looking at the ice figures, the next I was alone again and the cliff, mysteriously, was behind me. A spray of icy snow crystals stung my face. The wind was getting up. I looked at the sky and was surprised to see that a rolling carpet of heavy cumulus had covered the sun. Another gust of wind made me turn my face away. A storm was building. It was cold in the wind, which had sprung up from nowhere and now buffeted me with increasing force. I hurriedly pulled on my mitt and turned to face the footprints.

I was less dazed now, and the voice had banished the mad thoughts from my mind. An urgency was creeping over me, and the voice said: ‘Go on, keep going…faster. You’ve wasted too much time. Go on, before you lose the tracks,’ and I tried hard to hurry. The wind gusted fine clouds across the glacier ahead of me. They swirled low over the surface. Sometimes they covered me and I could see no more than a few yards, but if I sat up I could see over fine spindrift that scooted across the glacier, making it look as if the glacier were rushing forward in whirls and eddies. I wondered what people would think to see this head and torso sticking out from the glacier. I lay on my side and crawled in fast bursts, before popping my head above the stormy curtain again to peer forward. There was snow in the air above. Fresh falling snow! My stomach tightened as panic threatened. The snow and wind would hide the footprints. The voice said I would lose my way, said I would never get through the crevasses without the prints, and told me to hurry on, but what I was really frightened of was losing a sign of life in the empty bowl of mountains surrounding me. I had followed the footprints happily, as if Simon were just up ahead and I wasn’t alone. Now the wind and snow threatened to leave me utterly alone. I clawed feverishly through the gusting snow, squinting ahead at the rapidly fading tracks.