10 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.
The light faded quickly. Night was approaching and with it the wind grew stronger. I didn't waste time warming my frozen hands, but urgently followed the soft marks of filled-in footprints until I could see no more. It was dark. I lay face down in the snow defeated. The strenuous crawling had warmed me and I could lie still feeling the wind pushing snow up around me without being cold. I wanted to sleep. I couldn't be bothered to move any more. I was warm enough sleeping on the snow. The storm would cover me like a husky and keep me warm. I nearly slept, dozing fitfully, edging close to the dark comfort of sleep, but the wind kept waking me. I tried to ignore the voice, which urged me to move, but couldn't because the other voices had gone. I couldn't lose the voice in daydreams.
'... don't sleep, don't sleep, not here. Keep going. Find a slope and dig a snow hole ... don't sleep.'
The darkness and the storm confused me. I lost track of how long I moved through the snow, and even forgot that I was on a glacier with crevasses all around me. I kept crawling forward blindly. Once there was a roaring, louder than the wind, and a sudden blast of ice fragments hit me. An avalanche, or a cornice falling from Yerupaja into the glacier. I registered that it hit me, its force spent, and swept over me. Then the wind noise returned and I forgot the avalanche. It never occurred to me that I might have been in danger.
Suddenly I rolled forward and fell. In the dark I couldn't make out what I had slid into with a rush. As I came to a stop, I turned and faced the way I had come. There was a bank of snow above me, and I groped my way back up it, dragging at the snow with my axes, hopping and crying out with the pains in my knee.
I dug the snow hole in a confusion of pain and exhaustion. As I burrowed into the bank I was forced to twist and turn to enlarge the hole, so wrenching my knee excruciatingly from side to side.
The other voices returned once I was sheltered from the wind, and I dozed off with their images idly flitting through my mind. I jolted awake and started digging to the repeated tune of a song in my head, then dozed, then back to my voices.
I fumbled in my rucksack with unfeeling hands for my head-torch. I pulled my sleeping bag from the sack and found the torch inside. With its feeble dying light I saw that the cave wasn't long enough for me to lie stretched out, but I was too tired to carry on digging. Leaning forward to remove my crampons put unbearable pressure on my damaged knee. I groaned and sobbed with frustration as my deadened fingers flicked ineffectually over the heel-release bar. I couldn't grip the bar hard enough to pull the crampon from my boot. I was bent double over my legs trying to avoid breaking through the roof of the cave with my head and cried with pain and impotent fury. I stopped pulling at the bar and sat quietly until the idea to use my axe came to me. The bar on each boot popped off easily with the leverage from the axe. I lay back in the cave and dozed.
Hours seemed to pass before I had laid out the insulation mat and struggled into my sleeping bag. Hefting my broken leg into the bag was awkward and pain- wracked. The boot snagged on the wet fabric of the bag, jerking fire from the knee joint. My leg felt amazingly heavy when I lifted it into the bag, and it felt dead and lumpy. It got in the way like a pestering child, making me irritable, as if it were something I ordered around and it stubbornly refused to obey.
There was no sound of the storm raging outside. Occasionally I felt the wind tug at the end of the sleeping bag protruding from the entrance, and then this also fell quiet as the snow covered my feet and sealed the cave. I checked my watch. Ten-thirty. I knew I must sleep, yet now that it was safe to sleep I felt sharply awake. Memories of the crevasse came back in the dark of the cave and forced hopes of sleep away. My knee throbbed unmercifully. I worried about getting frostbitten feet, and thought of my fingers. It occurred to me that I might not wake up if I fell asleep, so I kept my eyes open and stared into the dark. I knew I was being scared unnecessarily by such thoughts now that it was dark and I had nothing more to do, but it didn't help.
Eventually I slept in a dreamless black stupor. The night was long and silent while the storm blew itself out on the snows above me, and from time to time pain and childish fears ambushed my sleep.
It was late when I awoke. The sun glowed through the tent walls, making me uncomfortably hot in my sleeping bag. I lay motionless, staring at the domed roof. It seemed incredible that at this time yesterday I had been stumbling through the crevasses at the end of the glacier. Joe had been dead thirty-six hours. I felt as if he had been gone for weeks, yet it was only seven days since we had set off together up the mountain. There was a hollow ache inside which no food could fill; it would pass with time. Already he was a vaguely recollected memory. It was strange how I couldn't picture his face in my mind. So, he was gone, and there was nothing I could do to change it. I fumbled with numb fingers to release the sleeping-bag draw cord, shuffled it off me, and went out to the sun. I was hungry.
Richard was busy priming the petrol stove by the cooking rock. He glanced at me and smiled. It was a beautiful day; one of those days to make you feel good and zestful. I went to the river bed and urinated on a boulder. Sarapo loomed in front of me but its spectacular beauty no longer interested me. I was bored with this place and these pretty views. There was no point in being here. It was barren and lifeless; I hated the place for its cruelty, and for what it had made me do. I wondered whether I had murdered him.
I walked back to Richard and hunkered down beside him in a black despairing mood. He silently handed me a cup of tea and a bowl of milky porridge. I ate quickly and tasted little. When I had finished I walked over to the tent, collected my washing things and made my way to a deep pool in the river. I stripped off and stepped into the freezing water, dipping myself hurriedly under and gasping as the cold took my breath away. The sun dried me and warmed my back as I shaved. I spent a long time by the pool, cleaning my clothes and picking at the sunburn on my face. It was a peaceful, cleansing ritual and my despair gradually faded as I mulled over the past few days. When I walked back to the tents it was with a fresh spirit. It had happened and I had done everything possible. Okay, he was dead and I wasn't, but that was no reason for tormenting myself. I had to get things straight in my own mind before I could return and face the inevitable criticism. I knew that once I had accepted it all then I could tell others. They would never know what it had been like, and I doubted whether I could ever articulate it, even to close friends, but I didn't have to so long as it felt right inside. The healing process had started. For the moment I was content.
Richard had left the camp when I returned. I searched round the tent looking for the medicine box. It lay partly hidden by some of Joe's clothes at the back of the tent. I threw it on to the grass outside and then sifted through his things. After fifteen minutes there was a pile of clothes and possessions lying in the sun by the medicines. I sat beside them, opened the medicine kit and began systematically to dose myself. I swallowed Ronicols, to improve the circulation in my fingers and prevent the frostbite taking too deep a hold. Wide-spectrum antibiotics followed, to combat infection. Then another drawn-out session of picking, cleaning and inspecting followed. It was wonderfully restorative. The ritualised examination seemed to confirm to me that everything was back to normal. It was a luxury and a balm. Feet, fingers, face, hair, chest and legs - all got the treatment.
When I had finished I turned to the pile of possessions and began sorting through them. I placed all his clothes in one pile and laid out his possessions in a line to one side. I felt quite calm and mechanical as I separated them. I found his used film and a zoom lens in a plastic bag. It was a large bag so I gathered all the things I wanted to give to his parents and put them in as well. There wasn't much.
I found his diary. He had written something almost every day, even on the plane from London. He liked writing. I glanced through it but didn't read the words. I didn't want to know what he had said. I ignored what climbing equipment he had left behind. It was of no value to anyone but a climber. I would pack it home with my gear. When I turned to his clothes I flicked through them quickly. I soon found his hat. It was a black-and-white patterned woolly hat with its bobble missing. I knew he had really liked it, and I placed it in the bag with the rest. It came from Czechoslovakia. Miri Smidt had given it to him in Chamonix. I couldn't bring myself to burn it.
Richard came back just as I had finished with what I would give to Joe's parents. He fetched some petrol and we burnt the clothes in the river bed. The trousers wouldn't burn well and we had to use a lot of petrol. Richard had suggested we should give them to the girls and the kids down in the valley. They would have liked to have them, as their clothes were so tattered, but I went ahead and burnt them.
When it was over we returned to the cooking rock and sat quietly in the sun. Richard made a hot meal and provided endless cups of tea. We played cards or listened to music on the personal stereos. Richard went and fetched Joe's stereo from the plastic bag because his was broken, and the day passed idly. When we talked it was quietly and about home or future plans. The hollow feeling was still with me and the guilt which I knew I could never erase, but I could deal with it now.
Photos
No place to be crawling un-roped.
The beautiful Yerapaja dominates the Siula Grande glacier.
(from left) Yerupaja, Siula Grande, Siula Chico, Sarapo (foreground).