Survivor: The Autobiography

by Lewis, Jon E.

  ‘They’ll freeze to death out there,’ I said. Whereupon I untied the flap by which we entered our tent and shouted. A minute or so passed before a wretched apparition dragging a sleeping-bag after him appeared in the doorway. Unceremoniously Pépé and I helped him in; he was almost on the verge of collapse. He was only eighteen and, I noticed, had no gloves. Why did he come? A few minutes later there was a further cry, and a little later another figure appeared at the entrance – we got him in as well. How we did so I don’t know.

  It was then about seven o’clock in the evening and for the next sixteen hours the two-man tent (reduced to one-man in capacity) bulged with five frozen human beings. It was suffocating, yet freezing, and I kept making involuntary little lunges at the roof in quest of oxygen. If I’d had a knife I would have cut a hole and stuck out my nose. Instead I ran my fingers over the cold, moist canvas and applied them to my forehead. It helped for a few short seconds – it was like a self-baptism. But a little later I stood it no longer and dived bodily for the entrance flap, untied it, and ejected my head dartingly like a cobra in the act of striking, but brought it back into the tent as suddenly for outside the cold was equally insupportable. When circulation died in our feet we rubbed each other feverishly; two of us were too ill to bother. Perhaps they were fortunate – rubbing is very painful. We attempted two songs – they died as soon as they came to our lips. Two of us devoured the prunes, one did not want them and the other two did not know, I suppose, we even had them. Oh, the lassitude!

  Even when dawn came again and the wind had dropped we could not get out for a blanket of mist enveloped the entire mountain. We had to wait until nearly eleven o’clock before the sun broke through.

  By this time Edmundo had slightly recovered. It was decided now that we were on the crater we must try to scale a dangerous ice and snow pinnacle that rose some 150 feet above the lip. It has never been climbed. Accordingly, after an intense struggle to separate and find our various ‘dismembered’ limbs, we crawled out and put on our boots and crampons. How hateful they were! Fearful objects that no longer seemed part of us.

  Leaving the tent and the other two within it, we climbed the few feet to the crater, in enforced slow motion, and then walked carefully along the lip. The wind was unbelievably painful on our right cheeks. There was nothing to see within the ‘chimney’ – nothing but scurrying mist and general murkiness. We moved for perhaps a hundred yards before the eminence that was our immediate goal came into view. It looked horribly sheer and full of predatory cornices. Soon we reached its base, but the mist, suddenly, totally obscured it. We couldn’t remain where we were – the wind cut through as if we had no bone structure. We took cover behind a low line of frozen séracs – as though we were in a slit trench preparatory to a final assault. We remained crouched in this manner for twenty minutes without moving – the mist did not lift for more than a few seconds at a time. At last we could stand it no longer and we made our way back to the tent and hustled the others.

  With the visibility again getting worse, we struck camp and started off down the mountain in two parties as before. We came upon the crevassed areas again; more dangerous this time for there had been a fresh fall of snow in the night and consequently many new ‘bridges’ had been created.

  Suddenly I felt the snow move underfoot, shuddering and sliding away. Stupidly I had ventured on to one of the ‘new bridges’ although Edmundo ahead had missed it. I tried to throw myself forward to safety. Too late. I felt myself dropping, then happily came an agonizing jerk around the ribs, and the rope held.

  It was Pépé who had saved me. Even as the snow gave way, expectant as ever, he had stopped dead in his tracks, driving his ice-axe hard into the ground, twisting the rope like lightning around and at the same time leaning back on his heels to take the strain.

  But all I knew then as I hung suspended was an urgent shout from Pépé. I didn’t understand all the words but knew well enough what they meant.

  ‘Don’t move! Whatever you do – don’t move!’

  I felt rather like a marionette on a string until I at last managed to get a firm grip on the marginal snow.

  We reached the Base camp – at 15,800 feet – at about three o’clock on the same afternoon, spent the night, went down to Hacienda Ilitio next day, and from thence we walked on to the main trunk road at Lasso and there picked up a long-distance bus for Quito where we arrived at about ten o’clock the same evening. It had been a hectic thirty-six hours. I nearly broke down in the street outside the bus terminus while I awaited the arrival of a taxi. It was a very, very short wait perhaps of only fifteen minutes – but something within me broke and I lost the faculties of direction, decision, and initiative. I swayed towards the ground, but just as I was about to drop a cab appeared and I fell within into the back seat.

  The residents of the Residencia Lutetia were not all in bed as I groped my way through the hall. Paul Feret extricated himself from a group of people collected around the warmth of the fire.

  ‘Did you do it, Sebastian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The bit of the top?’

  ‘No.’

  Then Paul gave me an arm and I went to my room and fell into bed with all the clothes that had been around me on the crater. When I awoke to strong sunlight, I found someone had taken off my boots.

  American rock-climber. In 1972 Drummond made the first ascent of Arch Wall on the North Face of Trollrygen. The climb took twenty days.

  We reached Oslo in two days, nudging in under the shrouds of cloud spreading a thin fine rain upon toast-faced Norwegians and palefaces alike. It was the first rain for a month. Burning up to Romsdal on the bike, I found my cagoule was promiscuous in the rain, but Lindy, at the back of me, kept dry and fed me on chocolate and made me hum with her big hugs. I couldn’t lean on her as I could my cold companion of other years who pulled on my neck: my rain-slimed haul bag, my meticulous Humpty Dumpty. She was continually delighted at new waterfalls; she flew oohs to my ears and near the end of the journey, my goggles crying with rain, I raised a soggy arm at the alp of cloud shearing up a white mile. ‘That’s the wall,’ I roared. She gripped her hand on my arm, and yelled about the coming bend.

  Where am I? I’m cold. Thin mists shift past, touching me. Where is she? She must have got out of the bag. I shake my head out, struggling to look. There is another near me, raw-red in the white air. Hugh! A dream. I’m not on the Romsdalhorn. That was a week ago. Lindy isn’t here. This is the wall.

  So. Three nights. Almost 1,000ft. Our second ledge, Luckys. Seven pitches and a paper-dry cag. Hugh’s still in the bag, sleeping the sleep of the just, sound as a foetus, on his first wall. During the past three years I had, in three summers and a spring, snailed the mile-long approach scree twenty-three times and twenty times I came back. Not this time. ‘The Northern European Wall’; ‘The Mourning Wall’; ‘The Rurt Wall’ (Realised Ultimate Reality Troll); ‘The Lord of the Walls’; ‘The Drummond Route’ (if we said nothing they’d call it this); ‘The Royal Wall’, naw, what has Robbins ever done for you? You’ll never level with him.

  On our first cralk up to the wall – the scree is so steep that it’s like trying to ski uphill – we had climbed the first slabs, 200ft or so, gritty, nasty, wobbling to extreme. There had been the snow pitch, cricket size, and the jokes about forgetting the ice-axes, using skyhooks and étriers as we had no crampons and the ice was marble. Then the ’schrund and my little leap; it was all fun. After three trips we’d brimmed the hauls and I’d climbed the third, a squirrelly free up a great crooked slab, funnelling to an upside-down squeeze chimney that made me squeak. Then we went down, Lindy, who’d come up to watch, and I, slowly, like two old people, while Hugh flew off to the river where he swam among the salmon; the fishermen had all gone home. We just promised us a swim when it was all over.

  Returning, two days later, Hugh went first and the hauls went after, quite a while after. His first haul; his first artyfishyl; first hamouac; first air j
umar (barring one from a tree in Mexico). Hugh was, slowly, going up the wall. So it was noon when I set out on the fourth pitch.

  And it was seven in the evening when Hugh’s jumars gritted their teeth to follow. What passed in those seven hours is unforgettable: my mouth, sock-hot; my larynx strangling for spit; a fine trembling as of a thin wind trembling through me. It began with a layback of 20ft, wonderful but for the iron stone around my neck – it was a struggle, favourite uncle, was it not? Then the footholds faded away and I muttered on nuts under this thin roof until the only way up was up.

  There was a crack, not a crack crack, but a line, a cra . . . ; the start of a crack say. At any rate the bolts were in the haul bag and this was the third pitch of the NA Wall as far as I was concerned. My rurps curled up when I banged their heads and refused to sit still. After five fingernail knifeblades I got out my hook and sat on that, about as secure as the last angel to make it on to that pinhead. Then I struck dirt. Now dirt is okay if you can get dug in. I began and ended with a knifeblade which dangled sillily from my waist, and I was glad that it was not me that was holding the rope, for after four hours and 40ft I might have been caught napping. But Hugh wasn’t and as it was I only went 15ft for the hook stuck and though it trembled it snapped not, O Dolt.

  So then I had to free that bit, but after that it eased some. Nuts hammered in the dirt and at long last a ding dong bong. Hotheaded I’d reached a ledge, feeling a bit sorry for myself. ‘No Ledges’ we called it and it all hung out. There we had a pantomime in hammocks by head torch which was really not in the least bit funny. Hugh, as chattery as a parrot, floated above me in his one-point. He even said he was comfortable and had the cheek to take a shit. By a battery son et lumière I watched his anus line an angry eye; no voyeur but it might look my way. However, he missed me, my arms full of ropes like some deeply confused spider.

  ‘Ed! Come on, it’s light.’

  Oh, God, awake already.

  ‘Look at the sun.’

  Why don’t you go back to sleep?

  ‘Unh uh.’

  There and then I decided that if he was unable to lead the next pitch, then that was it. I’d led every pitch so far (didn’t you want to?) and it was unthinkable that I’d lead all of them. Not bloody likely. I’d make that clear. I tortoised out. What are you smiling at? Rather him than me. I’ve had about bloody five minutes bloody sleep. ‘Right, coming.’

  It was strange to be there, sitting up in the hammock, feet stirring in the air over the side, opening the haul, fingers weaseling in the cold stuff bags, tramp-thankful for food in the hand. Eating quietly we heard the whipcrack of breaking ice in the gloomy cwm below and I’d yell ‘hello’ with a dervish fervour (wake up, Drummond, grow up, you can’t go back). The echoes yodelled and I’d say to Hugh, ‘He’s there.’

  ‘Who?’ he’d ask.

  ‘That bloke,’ I’d tell him. ‘Listen.’ And I’d do it again and we’d both cackle like kids with a home-made phone.

  By 7 a.m. I was ready to belay him. I wasn’t laughing now. One more pitch and there would be no retreat. I moled into the cold rope bag, my arms up to my elbows, fingers fiddling for the iron sling. I had a krab, empty, ready on the belay to receive it. My fingers curled in the sling; I moved my arm gracefully, slowly (I was cold), to clip it into the krab before passing it up to him. If I drop the iron sling we’ll have to go back down. From the end of my arm my little family of fingers waved at me. And it went, there, no, once, twice, there, oh, down, out, there, and under and into the heart of the icefield, clinking like lost money.

  I couldn’t believe it. Hugh was silent. I kept saying I was sorry. I didn’t mean it. Not this time (How do you know?). I couldn’t believe it. Hugh said nothing.

  ‘I’ve done it now.’

  Instantly, ‘How long will it take you to get back up?’

  He’s got you now.

  I got back by noon, gasping. I’d come down to earth. A 600ft abseil, my figure-of-eight sizzling my spits at it, and then a free jumar all the way back. I was furious. ‘Right, belay on.’

  His pitch was perfect after a bit. Dirty at first, then a cool, clean fist-lock crack. Iron out in the air like a bunch of weapons, he groped at the sky like something falling. All around a sea-sheer swell of wall, untouchable. Him the one sign of life.

  Then the rain came. A dot in the eye. I heave for my cagoule, one eye on Hugh, an invisible drizzle blackening the rock. New noises fizz in. Twitters of water and Hugh is yelling for his cagoule, but I point out the time and that he’s leaking already. Well, for a couple of hours I kept pushing boiled sweets in my mouth and Hugh kept on moaning and kept on. After 150ft he had to stop and pin himself to the wall.

  Early evening. There he hung, wringing himself like fresh washing. Thank God he had no cagoule, or we would both have been up there for the night, him perched above, if not on, my head like a great wet heron. The waterfalls would weep all night. ‘Why wait for Godot?’ I yelled up. He said, ‘Eh?’ so I said, ‘Come on down, let’s piss off.’

  We stripped the ropes off the hauls, tied the lot together and down we went, happy as nuns in a car. A slalom down the scree and back before dark. Back in the camp hut we listened with Lindy, gladly, to the rain hissing outside while we kissed at a smug mug of tea and drooled on the food to come. That night I slept like a child.

  Eight days later, well picked, we humped up the boulder-fields in epileptic sun showers, snagged at by cold-cutting winds. The days were getting shorter.

  The bergschrund had rotted back and we had to go down inside the mouth. Our ropes were 20ft up the slabs, strung taut to a peg. I manteled up on this mica jug, massaging off the dust, feeling sick with this white pit under me, thirty feet deep, rocks in its dark, lurking.

  When I had the end of the rope I dangled a bong on and looped it to him. Three times I threw and three times I missed; each time the bong tolled dolefully. ‘Hey, our funeral knell,’ I yelled, but he wasn’t impressed.

  Two and half jumehours later Hugh brooded on the haul eggs, sucking the sacred sweet, as I botched up the freeasy and awkwaid of the next pitch. When I warbled down about the ledge I’d found, he said he’d kiss me, but on arrival he didn’t hold me to the treat. In fact, the first thing that he said was that the next pitch looked a bit steep for him and ordered me to do it. But since it was dark I could wait until tomorrow. Under the tube-tent, scarfed in cigar smoke, we crept to sleep like refugees.

  Pitch 7 took me all the next day. It is 156ft long; our ropes were 150ft long, at a stretch. That last six feet to the belay cracks saw me lying flat on my face on the ledge, hammering like front-crawling. Hugh climbed up from his end, pulling the haul bags (one at a time, and there were three, each weighing over fifty pounds) on to his shoulder and then weightlifting them up so that I could get them through the pulley. Hugh studied Law at university.

  So. Three nights. Almost 1,000ft. Lucky’s Ledge is no longer important. A stab of butter, a jab of honey; the pumpernickel crumbling among your fingers, a steamy censer of tea, packing your bags, hurrying as a jostle of cumulus smudges out the sun and the stove starts to fizz the drizzle.

  As I remember we made three pitches that day in a rain as insidious as gas. For two or three seconds, suddenly the valley would come like an answer, and we would stumble into conversation, then numb up, sullen with wet clothes and cold, clubbed feet. In the downpouring darkness I jumed up to Hugh, squatting on blocks, owl aloof. While he belayed me I hand-traversed down to a ledge on his left, where I backheeled and rubbled away for over half an hour, making the bed. We couldn’t find pin placements for the tube tent, so we hung our bivi bags from the rope and crept into their red, wet dark.

  Sneaking out the next day at noon like shell-less tortoises, I realised as we both emptied a gallon of fresh water from our bags, that it might be better to have the opening at the front rather than at the top of the bag. A point that had escaped me as I tried out the bag on the floor in front of the fire at home. Sneer not. Wasn�
�t the first Whillans Box a plastic mac and a pram? The Drummond Cot would have its night in time. Well, we strung the tube tent as an awning, lit the stove, and wrung our pulpy feet out, sitting in the cloud, machine-gunned by water drops from the great roofs that crashed out over 200ft wide, a thousand feet above our heads. We wriggled a little in the tent, slowly gulping lumpy salami, a bit stunned, stuttering with cold.

  At about four we took the hood off our heads and saw the valley for the first time in twenty hours: the curve of the railway line, the thin black line of the road, pastures of grass, the glitter of the river, the big stacks of corn like yellow firs. The red tractor a slow blood drop. Then we heard yells, names, my name, and saw a spot of orange jump at the toe of the scree. It was Lindy calling, calling, and I called for my favourite team: ‘LindyLindy LindyLindy,’ and the wall called with me. Hugh even asked if I was going out that night.

  Morning. The fifth day. Cornflower blue skies, fiord-cold in the shade, and above us brooded a huge wing of white granite, its edge a thin black slab about as long and steep as the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. I had seen this from the scree. We go that way.

  Two skyhooks raised me off the rubble, and dash, wobbling, for 10ft without protection – a necessary enema after the thirty-hour sit-in. Then I’m staring at a poor flare where I belt a nut. Little chains of sweat trickle down my back. I’m struggling to free climb and Hugh’s not even looking. Jerkily I straggle to a ledge, not a word of wonder escaping his lips as I braille for holds and shake on to this ledge with a flurry of boots. With time against us I was doing all the leading. Hugh sat still on his stone throne while I squirmed about, greasing my palms with myself. Still, a cat may look, and he was the one rock, the one unshakeable, all the way there and back.

  Abseiling down in the dying day, the bergschrund breaking its wave beneath my feet 1,500ft below in the cold ammonia air, the tube tent was a rush of bright flesh, raw on the ledge, and Hugh, his back bent, peering, was a black bird feeding at it. After a soup supper, watched by the smouldery eye of Hugh’s cigar, I blew my harmonica, and brought tears of laughter to our eyes. We were doing okay. Hugh even said he liked to hear me play.