6 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.
'Mine were real bad. I thought they were frostbitten,' I said.
'It's just the lowering. They really freeze up when I’m lowering. Can't get my middle fingers to warm. They've gone altogether.'
He had his eyes tight closed, fighting the hot aches. A heavier burst of spindrift sprayed over him but he ignored it. It partially filled the seat I had been digging. I swept it clear with the side of my arm.
'Come on. It's getting bad. We'll have to hurry.'
I lay beneath his feet, and when the rope came taut I shifted my weight off my foot and tensed against the prospect of another drop. He let me down with a rush and I cried out as my boot caught in the snow. I was looking at him when I cried out. He remained expressionless, and continued to lower me. He had no time for sympathy.
By the end of the fourth drop I had deteriorated. The shaking in my leg was continuous and unstoppable. The pain had reached a level beyond which it wouldn't go. It remained constant whether I snagged my leg or not. Curiously, it had become more bearable, for I no longer winced and tensed at the prospect of catching my foot. I could adjust to the steady pain. My hands, however, were much worse. The rewarming, repeated at the end of every lowering, was less effective each time. Simon's hands were even worse than mine.
The storm had steadily increased until the spindrift flowed continually down the slope, and threatened to push me off when I dug the seats. The wind gusted across the face, blasting the snow into exposed skin, and forcing itself through the tiniest of openings in clothing. I was close to exhaustion.
As the drops continued I lapsed into resigned tolerance. The object of the lowering had long since escaped me. I couldn't think any further ahead than simply enduring the present. Simon said nothing at the change-overs, his expression fixed and rigid. We had locked ourselves into a grim struggle, my part was pain-wracked, Simon's an endless physical battle to get me down almost 3,000 feet without a break. I wondered how often it had occurred to him that the seats might collapse at any moment. I was beyond caring about such things, but Simon knew all the time that he could descend alone quite safely if he chose. I began to thank him for what he was doing, and then quickly stopped myself. It would only emphasise my dependence on him.
I dug the fifth belay seat while Simon climbed down to me. I didn't get far. After clearing the surface snow away I struck water ice. I was standing on my left foot but it wasn't kicked deeply in. I perched on the front points of my crampons, a worrying position because I could feel my calf muscles tiring from the strain, and the idea that I might slip preyed on my mind. It would rip us both off the mountain. To make matters worse, the effort of staying quite still made me feel nauseous and dizzy. I kept shaking my head and pressing it against the snow, terrified that I might faint. It seemed such a stupid way to die after we had been through so much.
It was a measure of how cold I had become to see how long it took before I thought of hammering an ice screw into the slope. The wind and constant avalanches had fogged my mind after numbing my body. Even when the idea did occur to me, it took some time to break through the lethargic apathy that engulfed me, and turning it into action seemed an achievement in itself. I was alarmed at my behaviour. I had heard of people succumbing to cold without realising it, reacting lazily and without thinking. When I had tied into the ice screw, I leant back on it and began a vigorous warming and waking exercise. I moved as much of my body as I could, flapped my arms, rubbed myself briskly and shook my head. I warmed gradually, and felt the sluggishness clear away.
Simon noticed the ice screw. It was in the only ice we had so far found on the face, and he looked at me questioningly. 'There must be something below us. A steep section, something like that,' I said.
'Yeah. I can't see a thing down there.' He was leaning out from the screw peering intently below him. 'It does get steeper but I can't see what's causing it.'
I looked down and saw only the swirling clouds of spindrift whipping down. The sky was full of snow. It was either falling, or being blown by the wind. The end result was the same - white-out conditions.
'It wouldn't be a good idea to lower me if you don't know what's below,' I said. 'It could be anything… a rock buttress, ice fall, anything.'
'I know, but I can't remember seeing anything very large when we were on Seria Norte. Can you?'
'No. A few rock outcrops maybe, but nothing else. Why don't you abseil down and give me some tugs if it's okay to follow. I reckon I can abseil myself.'
'We haven't any choice. Right, I'll put another screw in.'
He hammered the screw into the hard water ice and clipped the doubled rope through it. I untied from the rope, staying safely clipped into my own ice screw. When Simon reached the end of the rope he would organise a belay and then signal me to follow. I shouted to him when he had abseiled below me:
'Keep a knot in the end of the ropes. If I faint I don't want to go off the end.'
He waved acknowledgment and slid down into clouds of spindrift. He was soon lost from sight and I was alone. I tried not to think of anything happening to him. I stood quietly on one foot, gazing into the snow swirling madly round me. There was only the sound of hissing as it sprayed off my jacket, and occasional tugs from the wind. It was a wild place in which to be alone. I thought of the sun on Yerupaja through the window in the snow-cave - that was this morning! God! It seemed so very long ago. Only this morning… and we had come down the ridge, and over those crevasses, and then the ice cliff. A lifetime away… so much had changed. The cold crept through me again, and I could feel its heavy slowness spreading.
I started my warming routine again, flapping, rubbing, driving the intruder away. Then I saw the ropes jerk spasmodically. I grabbed hold of them and felt the tugs come up the ropes again. I fixed my belay plate on to the ropes, and removed the ice screw from which I had been hanging. I let my weight come down carefully on to the abseil ropes, watching the ice screw for any warning signs of failure. The ropes eased through the plate, and I slid down after Simon.
After twenty feet the slope dropped vertically under me. I stopped moving and glanced down. I could see the angle ease about fifteen feet below. Beyond there was only spindrift. As I abseiled past the wall I could see that it consisted of patches of ice plastered on to a steep rock face. It went slowly past me in short stepped walls with steep ice cascades in between. Once or twice I bumped painfully against the rock, but for the most part I found abseiling to be easier and a lot less traumatic than being lowered. I could control the speed of descent, which helped. The steep walls were entirely pain-free because I could twist away and let my injured leg hang free in space, and even on the cascades I managed to keep from snagging it.
I was concentrating on abseiling carefully, and had become quite engrossed in what I was doing, when Simon's voice broke into my thoughts. I looked down, and saw him leaning back on an ice screw grinning at me:
'There's one more steep bit. I saw the snow slope running below it, so it can't be far.'
As he spoke he reached out and caught hold of my waist, tugging me gently towards him. He was careful, almost tender, in the way he spun me round so that I was facing out from the slope when I came to a stop beside him. He clipped me into a second ice screw that he had placed beside the one on which he was hanging, and directed my uninjured leg to a foothold that he had hacked from the ice. I realised then that he had been fully aware of the pain he had been putting me through, and this concern was a quiet way of saying, it's all right. I wasn't being a bastard. It just had to be done.
'Not far now. Maybe another four lowers after this next abseil.'
I knew he was guessing. He was trying to cheer me up, and I felt deeply grateful. For a short moment on the storm-swept belay we had accepted a warm sense of friendship. It felt like some cliché from a third-rate war movie - We're all in this together, lads, and we're all going to make it home. It also felt true and real, something unassailable in all the uncertainty. I put my arm on his shoulder and smiled at him. Behind his grin I could see the truth of our situation. It had taken a lot out of him and he looked drawn. His face, pinched with cold, showed all the tension he had been through, and his eyes didn't smile. There was concern and anxiety there, and I could see that, despite his confident words, a dark uncertainty reflected the real story.
'I’m all right,' I said. 'The pain's not so bad now. How are your hands?'
'Bad, and getting worse.' He grinned at me, and I felt a stab of guilt. It was costing him. I had already paid.
'I'll abseil down and set up the belay.'
He stepped away from the slope and hopped smoothly into the vortex of spindrift below.
I quickly joined him at the large bucket seat he had excavated. We were back to lowering from non-existent belays. I checked my watch. I couldn't see the face, and was surprised to notice how dark it had become. When I flicked the little watch light on, I saw that it was seven thirty. It had been dark for over an hour and I hadn't noticed! It made me realise how little I had had to do. Digging belay seats and closing my mind to the lowering hadn't needed any light.
The warmth of feeling on the abseil belay stayed with me through the next drop, and I had to resist the urge to giggle excitedly as the descent continued. I felt childishly irrational. The thought of reaching the glacier and a snug snow-cave had become irresistible. It flooded through my mind like the images of a hot meal in front of the fire after a long cold day on the hills. I tried to push it away, fearful that to think this way would be to invite disaster. I want never gets, I told myself, but it didn't work. The lowering went quicker and easier. The pain stayed with me but it was secondary: getting down was all I could think about.
The system of lowering became second nature, as if we had been practising it for years, and as we slid down unseen through the storm the sense of optimism snowballed with every foot descended. Simon's grin widened at every meeting and his eyes, bright in the light from my head-torch, said it all. We had regained control of the situation, and it no longer felt as if we were fleeing in disarray or fighting desperately against the odds. We knew we were making a controlled and orderly descent.
I hunched my shoulders against an unusually heavy rush of spindrift and braced myself until it spent itself. Moving again, the build-up of snow between my chest and the slope flowed down over my legs, and I brushed the powder from the belay seat I had dug. The weather showed no sign of improving, but at least it was not getting worse. Simon appeared from the murk above me. His light flashed yellow off the clouds of snow. I kept looking at him so that my head-torch light would guide him down. He reached me as another avalanche swept over us. We both ducked.
'Bloody hell! That one before nearly knocked me off.'
'They've been getting bigger. Probably because we're near the bottom. There's more snow to build up on the way down.'
'I was thinking of unroping. Then I won't take you down if I get hit hard.' I laughed. If he fell past me, leaving me the rope, I would be able to do nothing with it.
'I'd fall anyway, so you might as well stay roped. That way I won't have to think about it… and I can blame you!'
He didn't laugh. He had almost forgotten that I was hurt, and now I had reminded him. He settled himself into the seat and arranged the ropes for the next lowering. 'Two lowers to go at the most, I reckon. This will be the eighth, plus the two abseils, so we've covered two thousand seven hundred feet, or thereabouts. It can't be more than three thousand, so this might even be the last one.'
I nodded in agreement, and he grinned confidently at me as I slid down the slope and he faded into the snowstorm. Earlier, I had noticed that the angle of the slope was gradually easing. I took this as an encouraging sign which indicated how close we were getting to the glacier. However, soon after I lost sight of Simon I noticed the slope steepening again. I slid faster, and snagged my foot more frequently. I was distracted by the pain and discomfort, and thought no more of the slope. I struggled vainly to clear my foot from the snow before giving up and accepting the torment.
The sense of weight on my harness increased, as did the speed. I tried braking with my arms but to no effect. I twisted round and looked up into the darkness. Rushes of snow flickered in my torch beam. I yelled for Simon to slow down. The speed increased, and my heart jumped wildly. Had he lost control? I tried braking again. Nothing. I stifled the rising panic and tried to think clearly - no, he hadn't lost control. I'm going down fast but it's steady. He's trying to be quick… that's all. I knew it to be true, but there was still something wrong.
It was the slope. Of course! I should have thought of it earlier. It was now much steeper, and that could mean only one thing - I was approaching another drop.
I screamed out a frantic warning but he couldn't hear me. I shouted again, as loud as I could, but the words were whipped away into the snow clouds. He wouldn't have heard me fifteen feet away. I tried to guess how far I was from the half-way knot. A hundred feet? Fifty? I had no idea. Each lowering became timeless. I slid for ever through the boiling snow without any sense of time passing - just a barely endurable period of agony.
A sense of great danger washed over me. I had to stop. I realised that Simon would hear nothing, so I must stop myself. If he felt my weight come off the rope he would know there must be a good reason. I grabbed my ice axe and tried to brake my descent. I leant heavily over the axe head, burying it in the slope, but it wouldn't bite. The snow was too loose. I dug my left boot into the slope but it, too, just scraped through the snow.
Then abruptly my feet were in space. I had time to cry out, and claw hopelessly at the snow before my whole body swung off an edge. I jerked on to the rope and toppled over backwards, spinning in circles from my harness. The rope ran up to a lip of ice and I saw that I was still descending. The sight vanished as a heavy avalanche of powder poured over me.
When it ceased I realised that I had stopped moving. Simon had managed to hold the impact of my body suddenly coming on to the rope. I was confused. I didn't understand what had happened, except that I was hanging free in space. I grabbed the rope and pulled myself up into a sitting position. The spinning continued but it was slowing down. I could see an ice wall six feet away from me every time I completed a spin. When I stopped spinning I was facing away from the wall and had to twist round to look at it. The spindrift had stopped. I shone my torch up the wall following the line of the rope until I could make out the edge I had gone over. It was about fifteen feet above me. The wall was solid ice and steeply overhanging. The rope jerked down a few inches, then stopped. Another avalanche of powder poured over the edge, and the wind blew it in eddies round me. I hunched protectively.
Looking between my legs, I could see the wall dropping below, angled away from me. It was overhanging all the way to the bottom. I stared down trying to judge the height of the wall. I thought I could see the snow-covered base of the wall with the dark outline of a crevasse directly beneath me, then snow flurries blocked my view. I looked back at the edge above. There was no chance of Simon hauling me up. It would have been extremely hard with a solid belay. Sitting in the snow seat, it would be suicidal to attempt it. I shouted at the darkness above and heard an unintelligible muffled yell. I couldn't be sure whether it had been Simon or an echo of my own shout.
I waited silently, hugging the rope with my arms to stay upright, and feeling shocked as I stared between my legs at the drop. Gradually, and with a sense of mounting dread, I began to get some perspective into what I was looking at. I was an awfully long way above the crevasse at the base of the cliff, and as it slowly dawned on me I felt my stomach lurch with fear. There was at least 100 feet of air below my feet! I kept staring at the drop, hoping to find I was mistaken. I realised that, far from being wrong, I had been conservative in my estimate. For a moment I did nothing while my thoughts whirled and I tried to assess how things had changed. Then one fact jolted through my thoughts.
I swung round and stared at the wall. It was six feet from me. At full arm's reach, I still couldn't reach the ice with my axe. I tried swinging towards the wall but ended up spinning helplessly. I knew that I had to get back up the rope, and I had to do it quickly: Simon had no idea what I'd gone over. The other steep drops were short walls. He had no reason to assume this would be any different. In that case he might lower me. Oh, Jesus, I'll jam on the half-way knot long before I get to the bottom!
It was impossible to reach the wall, and I realised quickly that it wouldn't help me. I couldn't climb fifteen feet of overhanging ice with one leg. I fumbled at my waist for the two loops of rope I had tied there. I found them but couldn't grip them with my mitts on. I wrenched off the mitts with my teeth and reached for the two loops again. I slipped one over my wrist and held the second in my teeth. In reaching for the loops I had let go of the rope and tumbled over backwards so that I hung from the waist. My rucksack had pulled me over, and I hung in an inverted curve with my head and legs lower than my waist. I struggled to swing up until I reached the rope and pulled myself back to a sitting position.
I crooked my left arm around the rope to hold me upright, and took the loop from my teeth with my right hand. I tried to twist the thin loop of cord around the rope but my fingers were too numbed. I needed to get a Prussik knot on to the rope, so that I could slide the knot up and hang in tension as the knot tightened. The effort of holding myself up was exhausting. At last, using a combination of teeth and hand, I managed to twist the loop around the rope, and then tried repeating the process. I needed at least three twists before the knot would be of any use. By the time I had succeeded I was almost crying with frustration. It had taken me nearly fifteen minutes. The wind nudged me into a gentle spin and blasted the incessant avalanches into my face, blinding me. I clipped a karabiner into the Prussik loop and fastened it to my waist.
I shoved the loop as far up the rope as I could reach and leant back on it. The knot tightened, slipped a few inches, and then held me. I let go of the rope and hung back. I remained sitting up. The second loop had to be tied on to the rope but this time I would be able to use both hands.
It wasn't until I tried to slip it off my left wrist that I realised how useless my hands were. Both were frozen. I could move the fingers of my right hand, but my left hand, which had been still as I held on to the rope, had seized. I thumped them together, bending the fingers in against my palms. I hit them, bent them, hit them, again and again, but there were no hot aches. Some movement and feeling returned but it was minimal.
I took the loop from my wrist and held it against the rope. At my first attempt to twist it around and back inside itself I dropped it. It fell on to the main rope knot on my harness and I grabbed at it before it was blown off. Then, as I lifted it to the rope, it seemed to slide out of my hand. I grabbed at it with my left hand and managed to catch it against my right forearm. I couldn't pick it up. My fingers refused to close round it, and as I tried slipping it up my arm it dropped again. This time I watched it fall away beneath me. I knew at once that I now had no chance of climbing up the rope. It would have been hard enough doing it with two loops, and now, with both hands so useless, I had no chance. I slumped on to the rope and swore bitterly.
At least I wasn't having to hold myself up. It was a consolation although I knew it achieved little else. The rope ran up from my waist taut as an iron bar. The loop I had attached gripped the rope three feet above my harness. I unclipped it from my harness and then threaded it through my rucksack straps so that it pulled them together across my chest. I fastened it with my last karabiner and leant back to test it. The effect was good. The loop now held my torso up on the rope so that I sat in space as if in an armchair. When I was sure it was as good as I could get it, I slumped back on to the rope feeling utterly weary.
The wind gusted against me, making me swing crazily on the rope, and with each gust I was getting colder. The pressure of the harness on my waist and thighs had cut off the circulation and both legs felt numb. The pain in the knee had gone. I let my arms hang slackly, feeling the deadweight of useless hands in my mitts. There was no point in reviving them. There was no way out of this slow hanging. I couldn't go up, and Simon would never get me down. I tried to work out how long it had been since I had gone over the edge. I decided it could be no more than half an hour. In two hours I would be dead. I could feel the cold taking me.
Twinges of fear lurked round my mind but even these were fading as it crept through me. I was interested in the sensations, wondering idly how it would take me. At least it wouldn't hurt - I was glad of that; the hurting had worn me out and it felt so calm now that it was over. Above my waist the cold slowed its progress. I fancied how it would ease its way up, following veins and arteries, creeping inexorably through me. I thought of it as something living; something which lived through crawling into my body. I knew it didn't work like that, but it felt as if it did, and that seemed a good enough reason to believe it. I wasn't going to argue about it with anyone; of that I could be sure. I almost laughed out loud at the idea. I felt so tired; sleepy tired, and weak. I had never felt so weak; a limbless, disembodied feeling. It was odd.
I jerked down sharply, and bounced on the rope. When I turned to look at the wall I realised I was going down. Simon was lowering me again. I shook my head, trying to clear the lethargy. He had no chance. I was sure that he was gambling on being able to get me down before the knot jammed. Secretly I hoped he could, and knew with certainty that he had no chance. I screamed a warning into the night. There was no reply. I continued falling steadily. I looked down and saw the crevasse below me. I could see it clearly. When I looked up I could no longer make out the top of the cliff. The ropes ran up into snow flurries and disappeared. There was a small jerk, then another, and I stopped.
Half an hour passed. I stopped shouting at Simon. I knew he was in the same situation as me, unable to move. Either he would die in his seat or be pulled from it by the constant strain of my body. I wondered whether I would die before this happened. It would happen as soon as he lost consciousness, and maybe he would do so before me. On the rope I was clear of the worst avalanches. He would be colder than me.
Each thought of death, of mine or his, came quite unemotionally - matter-of-fact. I was too tired to care. Perhaps if I was scared I would fight harder, I thought, and then dismissed the idea. I was scared tying the loops and it hadn't helped. Toni Kurtz had fought and fought when he was dying on the Eiger. He had never once stopped fighting, and he had dropped suddenly dead on the rope still fighting to live. Rescuers had watched him die. It seemed strange to be in the same situation and not be bothered… maybe it's the cold? Won't be long now. I'll not last till morning… won't see the sun either. I hope Simon doesn't die, that's hard… he shouldn't have to die for me…
I jerked upright, the drifting aimless thoughts pushed away and replaced with a consuming anger at what had happened. I screamed at the wind. Swearing and yelling blind.
'On the last bloody lower, and after all that pain. YOU SHIT. YOU FUCKING BASTARD.'
Words wasted into the snow and wind, shouted to no one in particular in a shaking fury of bitterness and grievance. Idiot words, as meaningless as the hissing empty wind around me. Anger surged through me. It warmed me, shook me, driving the cold off in a tirade of obscenities and frustrated tears. I cried for myself and swore at myself. Everything came down to me. It was my knee that was smashed. I had fallen, and I was dying, and Simon with me.
The rope slipped. I bounced down a few inches. Then again. Had he freed the knot? I slipped again. Stopped. Then I knew what was about to happen. He was coming down. I was pulling him off. I hung still, and waited for it to happen. Any minute, any minute…
Joe had smiled as I let him slide away from me. It wasn't much of a smile. His pain twisted it into a grimace. I let him go fast and ignored his cries. He was quickly gone from my torch beam, and as another avalanche swept over my head the rope disappeared as well. Apart from his weight on my waist there was no sign of his existence.
I kept the speed going. The belay plate was easy to control despite my deadened fingers. They were bad now. I worried about them, as I had done since we left the col. I knew Joe's climbing days were over, but now I was scared for my hands. There was no telling how bad they would be. I had a quick look when it was light but I couldn't see how deep the damage was. Four fingertips were blackened, and one thumb, but there was no saying whether the others wouldn't also go the same way.
I heard a faint cry from below, and the rope jerked slightly. Poor bastard, I thought. I had hurt him all the way down. It was strange being so cold about it. It had been hard not to feel for him. It was easier now. We had made such fast progress. Efficient. I felt proud about it. We had held it all together, and that was good. The lowering had been easier than I had expected, especially with Joe digging the seats for me. He had really held it together. That was some control! I'd never asked him to dig the seats, but he just went ahead and did it. Wonder whether I would have done that? Who knows.
My hands were stiffening again. They always got bad before the knot; stiff, like claws. The rope ran out smoothly. I had been careful to avoid any tangles. The idea of holding Joe with one hand and trying to unsnarl a tangled and frozen rope didn't bear thinking about. The pull at my harness increased. The slope must be steepening again, I thought. There were another seventy feet to go before the half-way knot had to be changed over. I increased the rate of descent. I knew it was hurting him. When it had been light I could see his pain for a long way down, but we had got down. It was necessary. Another faint cry came from the darkness. A rushing flow of snow poured over me again. I hunched deeper into the seat, feeling the snow settle and crumble slightly. The seats lasted for the lower but by then they were well on their way to collapse.
Suddenly I jolted heavily forward from the waist and nearly came out of the seat. I threw my weight back and down into the snow, bracing my legs hard against the sudden pressure. Christ! Joe's fallen. I let the rope slide slowly to a stop trying to avoid the impact I would have got if I had stopped it dead. The pressure remained constant. My harness bit into my hips, and the rope pulling tautly between my legs threatened to rip me down through the floor of the seat.
After half an hour I let the rope slide again. Whatever Joe had gone over had stopped him getting his weight off the rope. My legs had numbed as the pressure on my hips cut the blood supply away. I tried to think of something to do other than lower. There was nothing. Joe had not attempted to climb back up. I had felt no trembling in the rope to tell me he was attempting something. There was no chance of hauling him up. Already the seat was half its original size. It had steadily disintegrated from beneath my thighs. I couldn't hold the weight much longer. The steep sections higher on the face had been less than fifty feet high. I decided that he would be able to get his weight off the rope after a short distance, and set a belay up. I had no choice.
As the rope ran out I realised that the pressure wasn't easing. Joe was still hanging free. What in hell's name was I lowering him over?
I looked down at the slack rope being fed through the belay plate. Twenty feet below I spotted the knot coming steadily towards me. I began swearing, trying to urge Joe to touch down on to something solid. At ten feet I stopped lowering. The pressure on the rope hadn't changed.
I kept stamping my feet. I was trying to halt the collapse of the seat but it wasn't working. I felt the first shivers of fear. Snow hit me again from behind, surging over and around me. My thighs moved down fractionally. The avalanche pushed me forward and filled the seat behind my back. Oh God! I'm coming off.
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.