9 In the Far Distance
The snow made soft rustling noises as it slithered into the depths below. I stared at the ice screw far above me, watching it getting smaller. The ice bridge which had stopped my fall stood out clearly. Behind it the open cavern of the crevasse faded into shadows. I gripped the rope gently, and let it slide through the belay plate at a smooth constant rate.
The desire to stop abseiling was almost unbearable. I had no idea what lay below me, and I was certain only of two things: Simon had gone and would not return. This meant that to stay on the ice bridge would finish me. There was no escape upwards, and the drop on the other side was nothing more than an invitation to end it all quickly. I had been tempted, but even in my despair I found that I didn't have the courage for suicide. It would be a long time before cold and exhaustion overtook me on the ice bridge, and the idea of waiting alone and maddened for so long had forced me to this choice: abseil until I could find a way out, or die in the process. I would meet it rather than wait for it to come to me. There was no going back now, yet inside I was screaming to stop.
I could not bring myself to look down to see what lay below. I dared not risk turning to discover just another deep hole. If I saw that I would stop immediately, and then what? A desperate struggle to remain on the rope fighting against the steep pull of the slope, unable to regain the ice bridge, but frantically trying to hang on as long as possible... No! I couldn't look down. I wasn't that brave. In fact I was having enough difficulty staving off the dread which swamped through me as I descended. It was this, or nothing... I had decided that on the bridge, and now I was committed. If it was to end here then I wanted it to be sudden and unexpected, so I kept my eyes fixed on the ice screw far above me.
The slope became steeper. When I was about fifty feet below the ice screw I felt my legs swing suddenly beneath me into open space. My grip stopped the rope involuntarily. This was the drop I had seen from the bridge! I stared up at the bridge trying to make myself release the rope again. I had experienced the sensation in the past, standing on the edge of a high diving board watching the water drops falling free from my hair to the pool below as I waged a mental battle to convince myself that there was nothing to it, daring myself to do it, and then off into space with a heart-stopping swoop, and laughter as I plunged safely into the water below. The knowledge that I could abseil until the rope ran out, and then fall into space as its unknotted end whipped through the belay plate, made me clench the rope even harder with my frozen hand. At last I released it and the old feeling - that the pool might suddenly move to one side, or the water empty as soon as I dived - returned once more, though I didn't know this time if there was a pool to aim for.
I abseiled slowly over the drop until I was hanging vertically on the rope. The wall of the drop was hard, clear, water ice. I could no longer see the ice screw, so I stared into the ice as I continued to lower myself past the wall. For a short while it held my attention, but as the light around me grew fainter the dread spilled over and I could contain myself no longer. I stopped.
I wanted to cry but couldn't. I felt paralysed, incapable of thinking, as waves of panic swept through me. The torment of anticipating something unknown and terribly frightening broke free, and for a helpless immeasurable time I hung shaking on the rope with my helmet pressed to the ice wall and my eyes tightly closed. I had to see what was beneath me because, for all my convictions, I didn't have the courage to do it blind. Surely it could not make me any more frightened. I glanced at the rope stretched tautly above me. It ran up the wall and disappeared on to the slope above. There was no possibility of getting back to that slope some twenty feet above me. I looked at the wall of the crevasse close by my shoulder. On the other side another wall of ice towered up ten feet away. I was hanging in a shaft of water ice. The decision to look down came as I was in the process of turning. I swung round quickly, catching my smashed knee on the ice wall and howling in a frenzy of pain and fright. Instead of seeing the rope twisting loosely in a void beneath me, I stared blankly at the snow below my feet not fully believing what I was seeing. A floor! There was a wide snow-covered floor fifteen feet below me. There was no emptiness, and no black void. I swore softly, and heard it whisper off the walls around me. Then I let out a cry of delight and relief which boomed round the crevasse. I yelled again and again, listening to the echoes, and laughed between the yells. I was at the bottom of the crevasse.
When I recovered my wits I looked more carefully at the carpet of snow above which I was dangling. My jubilation was quickly tempered when I spotted dark menacing holes in the surface. It wasn't a floor after all. The crevasse opened up into a pear-shaped dome, its sides curving away from me to a width of fifty feet before narrowing again. The snow floor cut through the flat end of this cavern, while the walls above me tapered in to form the thin end of the pear barely ten feet across and nearly 100 feet high. Small fragments of crusty snow pattered down from the roof.
I looked round the enclosed vault of snow and ice, familiarising myself with its shape and size. The walls opposite closed in but didn't meet. An arrow gap had been filled with snow from above to forma cone which rose all the way to the roof. It was about fifteen feet wide at the base and as little as four or five feet across at the top.
A pillar of gold light beamed diagonally from a small hole in the roof, spraying bright reflections off the far wall of the crevasse. I was mesmerised by this beam of sunlight burning through the vaulted ceiling from the real world outside. It had me so fixated that I forgot about the uncertain floor below and let myself slide down the rest of the rope. I was going to reach that sunbeam. I knew it then with absolute certainty. How I would do it, and when I would reach it were not considered. I just knew.
In seconds my whole outlook had changed. The weary frightened hours of night were forgotten, and the abseil which had filled me with such claustrophobic dread had been swept away. The twelve despairing hours I had spent in the unnatural hush of this awesome place seemed suddenly to have been nothing like the nightmare I had imagined. I could do something positive. I could crawl and climb, and keep on doing so until I had escaped from this grave. Before, there had been nothing for me to do except lie on the bridge trying not to feel scared and lonely, and that helplessness had been my worst enemy. Now I had a plan.
The change in me was astonishing. I felt invigorated, full of energy and optimism. I could see possible dangers, very real risks that could destroy my hopes, but somehow I knew I could overcome them. It was as if I had been given this one blessed chance to get out and I was grasping it with every ounce of strength left in me. A powerful feeling of confidence and pride swept over me as I realised how right I had been to leave the bridge. I had made the right decision against the worst of my fears. I had done it, and I was sure that nothing now could be worse than those hours of torture on the bridge.
My boots touched the snow and I stopped descending. I sat in my harness, hanging free on the rope a few feet from the floor, and examined the surface cautiously. The snow looked soft and powdery, and I was immediately suspicious of it. I looked along the edge where the floor joined the walls and soon found what I was looking for. In several places there were dark gaps between the ice walls and the snow. It was not a floor so much as a suspended ceiling across the crevasse dividing the abyss below from the upper chamber where I sat. The start of the snow slope running up to the sunshine lay forty feet from me. The inviting snow-carpet between me and the slope tempted me to run across it. The idea made me chuckle. I had forgotten that my right leg was useless. Okay. Crawl across it... but which way? Straight across, or keeping near to the back wall?
It was a difficult decision. I was less worried about putting my foot through the floor than by the damage such a fall would do to the fragile surface. The last thing I wanted was to destroy the floor and leave myself stranded on the wrong side of an uncrossable gap. That would be too much to bear. I glanced nervously at the beam of sunlight, trying to draw strength from it, and made my mind up at once. I would cross in the middle. It was the shortest distance and there was nothing to suggest that it would be any riskier than at the sides. I gently lowered myself until I was sitting on the snow but with most of my weight still on the rope. It was agonising to inch the rope out and let my weight down gradually. I found myself holding my breath, every muscle in my body tensed. I became acutely aware of the slightest movement in the snow, and I wondered whether I would end up sinking slowly through the floor. Then some of the tension in the rope relaxed, and I realised that the floor was holding. I breathed deeply, and released my aching hand from the rope.
I sat very still for five minutes, trying to get used to the precarious feeling of being balanced above a huge drop by a fragile sheet of snow. I belatedly realised that it was something I couldn't adjust to and that there was no choice but to attempt to cross the gap. I let out forty feet of rope and tied the remaining thirty feet to my harness. Then, lying spreadeagled on my stomach, I began to wiggle stealthily towards the snow cone, anxiety easing as I got closer to the other side. An occasional muffled thumping told me that snow had fallen away into the drop beneath the floor. I would freeze rigidly at the slightest sound, holding my breath and feeling my heart hammering before moving off again. The black holes in the floor were all behind me when I passed the half-way point and I sensed that I was now crawling over thicker and stronger snow.
After ten minutes I lay slumped against the slope rising towards the golden sun in the roof. The abseil rope hung in a curve before the ice wall and the steep slope above it running up to the ice bridge. If only I had known there was a floor down here I could have saved myself a lot of grief. The thought that I might have waited up there made me shudder. It would have been a drawn-out vigil of madness and cold. At the end I would have slipped into exhausted unconsciousness after enduring days of consuming despair.
I glanced up the snow cone. For a brief moment I wondered whether I had been deluding myself with the idea that I could possibly reach the sun above. It was a long way, and steep. I would be able to climb the slope while still tied to the rope. As I gained height the rope would rise with me until it hung almost horizontally between the snow bridge and the sun roof. A fall at any point would not prevent me from crashing straight through the floor, where I would swing in a pendulum in the lower cavern until I hit the ice wall down which I had abseiled. If that happened there would be no return to the snow cone, or the ice bridge. I thought of climbing without the rope. At least the end would be mercifully quick. I dismissed the idea. I needed the rope. It gave me a feeling of security.
A slight breeze ran through the crevasse and I felt it on my cheek, a chill, deathly brush from somewhere deep below me. The light in the chamber was a strange mix of blue-grey shadows and dancing reflections from the ice walls surrounding me. Rocks embedded in the walls stood out starkly in the wet translucent ice. I rested at the base of the snow cone, absorbing the feel of the crevasse. For all its hushed cold menace, there was a feeling of sacredness about the chamber, with its magnificent vaulted crystal ceiling, its gleaming walls encrusted with a myriad fallen stones, shadows facing into darkness beyond the great gateway formed by the ice bridge which hid the silent vault beyond. The menace was in my imagination but I couldn't stop it playing on my mind, as if this thing had waited for a victim with the impersonal patience of the centuries. It had me now, and without the sunbeam I might have sat there numbed and defeated by its implacable stillness. I shivered. The air was uncomfortably cold, was well below freezing. A puff of wind outside sprinkled powder through the hole in the roof, and I watched fascinated as it drifted in the sunlight. It was time to climb.
I stood up gingerly on my left leg letting my damaged limb hang uselessly above the snow. It had stiffened during the night and now hung shorter than my good leg. At first I wasn't sure how to set about climbing the slope, which I guessed to be 130 feet high - ten minutes' work with two legs. It was the angle of the slope that worried me. To begin with, it rose at an angle of only 45°, and I felt confident that I could drag myself up that, but as it gained height so the angle increased. The top twenty feet looked almost vertical, but I knew that my eyes were being confused by looking straight on to the slope. I decided it could be no more than 65° at the top. The thought wasn't encouraging: loose powder would be exhausting enough without the injury. I suppressed a growing pessimism by telling myself that I was lucky to have found a slope at all.
The initial steps were clumsy and unco-ordinated. I dug my ice axes deep into the snow above me and then hauled myself up the snow with my arms. It wouldn't work on the steeper slope above, and I realised how risky it was. If an axe ripped free of the snow I would fall. I stopped and tried to work out a better method. My knee throbbed painfully, harshly reminding me that I was a very long way from getting out.
Patterns! I remembered how I had traversed to the col with Simon. It seemed so long ago. That's the way. Find a routine and stick to it. I was resting on my axes looking at my good leg buried in the snow. I tried lifting the injured leg up parallel with it and groaned as the knee crunched and refused to bend properly, leaving the boot about six inches lower than the good foot. Pain flared up as I leant down and dug a step in the snow. I tamped it down as much as possible, then dug another smaller step below it. When I had finished I planted both axes in the slope above, gritted my teeth, and heaved my burning leg up until the boot rested in the lower step. Bracing myself on the axes, I made a convulsive hop off my good leg, pressing my arms hard down for extra thrust. A searing pain burst from my knee as my weight momentarily came on to it, and then faded as the good leg found a foothold on the higher step. I shouted an obscenity which echoed comically round the chamber. Then I bent down to dig another two steps and repeat the pattern. Bend, hop, rest; bend, hop, rest... The flares of pain became merged into the routine and I paid less attention to them, concentrating solely on the patterns. I was sweating profusely despite the cold. Agony and exertion blended into one, and time passed unnoticed as I became absorbed with the patterns of hopping and digging. I resisted the urge to look up or down. I knew that I was making desperately slow progress and I didn't want to be reminded of it by seeing the sunbeam still far above me.
After two and a half hours the slope had steepened considerably, and I had to be especially careful when I hopped. There was a critical moment when all my weight was on the axes driven into the loose snow, and the angle forced me to balance my movements precisely. I had nearly fallen on two occasions. One hop had missed the good step and I had slithered into the smaller step below, with my knee twisting beneath my weight. I had struggled to remain standing, fighting off the nausea and faintness. The second time I had hopped successfully but too explosively and had lost balance. Again I felt things move and grind in my knee as I swung violently forward into the snow to stop the fall. It was odd to curse and sob and hear the sounds repeated in the chamber below. Even more peculiar was the feeling of acute embarrassment at complaining like that. There was no one to hear, but the looming empty chamber behind me made me feel inhibited, as if it were some disapproving silent witness to my weakness.
I rested with my head against the snow. I was soaked in sweat but it cooled quickly when I stopped. Soon I was shivering. I glanced at the roof above and was delighted to see the sun nearly touching me. Looking down, I saw that I was two-thirds of the way up the snow cone. The chamber appeared even more cavernous from my high perch. The rope hung in a crescent from my harness to the ice screw at the ice bridge. I was level with the bridge, and the rope hung clear of the slope down which I had abseiled, stretching out eighty feet above the floor of the chamber below. Looking at the ice bridge, I felt disturbed at the memory of my time spent on it. It was hard to believe how desperate I had been in the night and while abseiling now that I was reaching for the sun. That was the hardest thing I had ever done, and thinking about it I felt a surge of confidence build in me. There was still a lot to fight for. I turned into the slope and began digging steps again.
It took another two and a half hours to reach a point ten feet below the hole in the roof. The angle of the snow had become almost impossibly difficult, and every hop had to be a measured gamble against losing balance and making the step. Fortunately the snow conditions improved as the cone narrowed and I found that I could get a solid axe placement in the ice wall to my left. I felt exhausted despite the approaching roof. The pain reached a level and then stayed constant. No amount of care could prevent the temporary weight I had to place on my knee, and I felt weak and sickened by the repeated twisted crunching spasms in the fracture site. I bent into the slope again and hopped, pulling up powerfully on the axe I had placed in the wall, and got my boot into the step without hurting the bad knee. The snow roof brushed my helmet. I was directly beneath the small head-sized hole in the snow. The glare from the sun was blinding, and when I looked down, the chamber had disappeared into inky darkness. I hefted my leg into the new step I had dug and prepared to make another hop.
If anyone had seen me emerge from the crevasse they would have laughed. My head popped up through the snow roof and I stared gopher-like at the scene outside. I kept hold of the axe planted in the wall of the crevasse and stood on one leg with my head stuck out of the snow, swivelling round to take in the most stupendous view I had ever seen. The ring of mountains surrounding the glacier were so spectacular that I hardly recognised what I was seeing. The familiar peaks had taken on a beauty I had never noticed before. I could see ice fields and delicately fluted ridges, and a dark sea of moraines curled out of sight from the snout of the glacier. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the sun glared from its azure emptiness with ferocious heat. I stood silent and stunned, unable to accept that I was at last free again. My senses had been so battered that I had forgotten what to expect at this moment of escape.
I hauled my hammer from the crevasse and drove it into the snow outside. When I hopped and rolled out of the yawning drop, I lay against the snow numb with relief. I felt as if I had been fighting someone too strong for me for far too long. Though the sun warmed through my back I still shivered. The heavy weight of despair and fear which had been with me for so long in the ice chamber seemed to melt away in the sun. I lay inert on the snow with my face turned to the glacier below and my mind empty of thoughts. The relief washing through me left me light-headed and weak, as if I had used up the last reserve of energy within me. I didn't want to move and risk disturbing the contentment and peace of lying there motionless in the snow. The blessed relief from tension, and darkness, and nightmare images, was total. I realised then just how frantic I had been during every second of the past twelve hours and in response my mind shut itself off from all but the sensation of relaxing. I felt drowsy from the sun and wanted to sleep and forget. I had succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. I had escaped without ever thinking I could, and for the moment that was enough.
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 tranquillity 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 adrenaline 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 200 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.
Photos
Line Drawing of route
Siula Grande looms above the glacier.