Far, Far the Mountain Peak

by Arthur Clifford

  John spoke first. ‘Me! I’ll go!’

  An anxious, nail-biting wait followed while Steadman stared him in the face. Oh God! Is he going to reject me? I’ll go crazy if he does!

  Then came the blessed reprieve. ‘OK. Anybody else?’

  Rob and Jim spoke up. ‘Me!’ ‘And me!’

  ‘How’s your guts, Rob?’

  ‘Nae frets. Nowt left inside. It’s all oot, like!’

  ‘Girls?’

  ‘Na!’ said Tracy. ‘Me an’ Maureen’s stayin’ here today.’

  ‘I’ll stay with ’em an’ all,’ added Michael.

  Emerging from his sleeping bag, Morris spoke up. ‘I’ll come too. I need a few hard mountains for my CV.’

  ‘No you won’t!’ replied Steadman in a hard and aggressive voice. ‘You’ll stay here and look after the weaker brethren. That’s your role!’

  He could have been squashing an irritating fly.

  Michael nudged John. ‘Bob’s usin’ up his nine lives reet quick! He’ll ’ave ter pay for this, yer knaa!’

  A Real Explorer Now, But Still the Odd Man Out

  It was into the dim blue world outside, a cool place where vast, black mountains reared their anarchic heads into a mass of glittering stars. They formed up into a line and Steadman led them slowly up a broad, stony track that wound its way up the valley ahead of them. The flood of the morning found them on top of a high pass. All around them was a pageant of rugged mountains, seemingly restored to life by the friendly rays of the rising sun. Resurrection. Life after death.

  Here Steadman announced breakfast, made a little fire and brewed up sweet, sugary mint tea. Extracting a roll of dry, unleavened bread from the depths of his rucksack, he tore off strips of it and handed them round.

  ‘Is this all we’re gerrin?’

  ‘Yes. We’re real explorers now, not pampered suburbanites on a jolly!’ Revenge being taken by proxy on the dreary suburban inhabitants of Moorside?

  ‘Time for a dump,’ declared John. ‘Anybody got my bog roll?’

  In an effort to be a ‘good expeditioner’ he’d donated his last remaining one to the community.

  ‘Na. Used it all up!’ replied Rob.

  ‘Bugger!’

  ‘You don’t need bog paper!’ snorted Steadman dismissively. ‘Just do what the locals do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Use water and your left hand.’

  ‘Ugh! That’s disgusting!’

  ‘Too precious, are we? I can see you’re not a proper explorer!’

  Another put-down. But don’t argue. Don’t want to join poor old Morris in the detention class, do you?

  ‘Well, get on with it, boy! We haven’t all day to waste on your toilette!’

  John slipped behind a convenient boulder. Luckily there was some coarse grass available for the ‘cleansing operation’.

  ‘Got the shits?’ asked Jim as he returned.

  ‘Not yet. Solid as a rock!’

  ‘Thought so! Some blerks is privileged, eh?’

  He was still the odd man out.

  Mountain Grandeur

  Steadman led them down the other side of the pass for a short way and then turned left and entered a deep, gloomy canyon, which wound its contorted way into the heart of a huge, flat-topped mountain, which loomed over them. As they squeezed their way between the enclosing walls and heaved themselves up the numerous rock steps, John felt a rush of excitement; that childhood thrill of secret passages in ruined castles.

  ‘Cor, this is better than Toubkal!’

  A scramble up a cliff face followed, and they emerged onto a flat, windswept plateau hemmed in on three sides by plunging crags. It was a bit like the flight deck of a gigantic aircraft carrier.

  ‘Lads!’ declared Steadman. ‘You’ve just climbed eleven thousand foot Angour Mountain!’

  He then led them to the southern rim of the plateau which ended suddenly in a sharp edge, almost as if the world was flat after all and they had inadvertently discovered its edge. The boys sat down with their feet dangling ostentatiously in the empty nothingness, each young male trying to outdo the others in a display of nonchalant bravado.

  Away to the south, beyond the void, a wall of mountains surged upwards with an arrogant disdain. To the left was a high, pointed, but seemingly accessible peak.

  ‘Is that Aksoual?’ asked John.

  ‘No! No!’ snapped Steadman. ‘Aksoual’s the peak to the right!’

  With a sweep of his arm he indicated a great, craggy spire that leapt skywards in a tumble of slabs and cliffs.

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘You didn’t imagine that I was going to let you have it easy, did you?’ The bearded, turbaned face broke into a supercilious grin: ‘You’ll be getting your sheer cliffs all right, Jonnie boy! Are you sure you will be able to handle them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to see, won’t we?’

  A mix of fears welled up in John: fear of the appalling mountain in front of him, fear of failing, and worst of all, fear of being forbidden to even try.

  Lunch followed. More sweet, sticky mint tea. More sheets of dry unleavened bread; cardboard, it seemed, masquerading as something edible.

  Then Steadman led them down an airy and precipitous ridge that swept off the southwest corner of the plateau and plunged down towards Tacheddirt.

  Kamikaze Mission?

  In mid-afternoon, dusty and tired, they stumbled back to the house.

  Morris met them. ‘Well, did you make it?’

  ‘Of course we did!’ snapped Steadman.

  A faint look of disappointment flickered across Morris’s face. Michael, standing next to him, winked at John.

  ‘Right, men!’ declared Steadman – now, apparently in ‘Victorious General’ mode, ‘You can have a brief rest, and then get yourselves ready for Phase Two, the assault on the North Face of Aksoual Mountain. We leave in an hour’s time.’

  ‘All of us?’ asked Morris.

  ‘No, just the mountaineers.’

  ‘But oughtn’t I to come along too?’ said Morris. ‘I’ve been studying Aksoual and, frankly, it looks pretty dangerous. You’ll need two trained adults with you if you’re thinking of taking a group of youngsters up there.’

  No response from Steadman.

  Hesitantly, Morris persisted. ‘I could send the two girls over the Likempt Pass with Mahomet and the donkey. Michael could go with them. He’s a steady and sensible lad. Responsibility would do him good.’

  ‘Don’t bother! This is a serious mountaineering expedition. I don’t want to be burdened with incompetents!’

  The stinging rebuke was visible to John and Michael, if not, perhaps, to the others.

  Morris was moved to a barbed retaliation. ‘You do know the way, don’t you? Taking untrained youngsters up a dangerous mountain face is downright irresponsible, you know. What if there was a serious accident? You wouldn’t have a leg to stand on at an inquest.’

  Steadman didn’t deign to reply.

  ‘Bob’s pushin’ it!’ Michael whispered to John.

  John remained silent. Fear was welling up in him again. Fear of the vast, precipitous mountain looming up before him. Fear, also, of Steadman: no longer his avuncular protector, but a primed land mine, requiring the skills of a bomb disposal expert to defuse. Fear that Steadman might suddenly consign him, shamed and disgraced, to the rearguard. He climbed up the ladder to the carpeted living room and sorted out his rucksack.

  A little later Michael sidled up to him. ‘Are yer sure yer’s gannin’ up that mountain with Bob, like?’ he whispered with an anxious look on his face.

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  ‘Well, Ah mean, Bob’s gone nutty, yer knaa! Joe says he don’t know the way an’ that he’s jus’ wantin’ ter show the folks
back home that he’s a proppa climber, like, an’ not jus’ an ole vicar. But he’s norra a proppa climber, Joe says. It could all end in sommat right rotten, yer knaa. Ah wouldn’t gan, John, really Ah wouldn’t.’

  ‘Don’t be such a wimp, Mike!’ snorted John. ‘I’ll be OK.’

  But beneath the adolescent bravado, he wondered if Mike were right. He wasn’t the brightest light on the tree – not by a long chalk! – but he was gifted with sound common sense. For a moment, he hesitated. But then he had no choice, had he? Supposing he chickened out now, and the others succeeded in climbing the mountain? He’d be confirmed as a posturing poofter. He went down the ladder and joined the climbing group outside.

  ‘Right, men!’ boomed Steadman, looking more manic than ever. ‘Final briefing! Tonight we climb a third of a way up the mountain. Early tomorrow morning we make the final assault on the peak. Then it’s down the south face to rendezvous with the rearguard at seventeen hundred hours.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ he added as an afterthought. ‘I’ve told Mahomet where to meet us. He knows the spot.’

  With that, the little group shouldered their packs and followed him through the green terraced fields. John felt like a Kamikaze pilot taking off on his final suicide mission: a tangle of exaltation and dread.

  A Night of Awe and Dread

  Steadman led them into the jaws of an immense canyon that seemed to slash the mountain ahead of them into two clumsy halves. It was a savage, unfinished sort of place, full of huge, brutal boulders and crude, overhanging crags.

  After a while, he turned to the right and clambered up a stony gully, which cut its way through a maze of slabs and cliffs. Above them a colossal rock face lurched crazily skywards towards terrifying and seemingly unclimbable heights. It was vaster and more hostile than anything John had ever seen before. Fear mounted: were Joe and Michael right after all? But keep going and try not to show it.

  Eventually they emerged onto a broad shelf, as if the mountain had taken a little breather from its relentless, puritanical steepness. Here they settled down for the night. Producing some twigs and tinder from his rucksack, Steadman brewed up some mint tea and then handed round more sheets of dry, unleavened Moroccan bread.

  Wrapping his threadbare old rug around him, John snuggled up against his rucksack and tried to keep warm. His nagging fears were absorbed – indeed, positively sucked out of him – by the sheer grandiose immensity of their situation. The fading light. The great peaks glowing a fiery red as they caught the rays of the setting sun. The wild, improbable towers of rock thrusting their insolent way into the darkening sky. The enormous mountain face above him, cascading crazily down like a waterfall of rock, threatening to sweep away their little perch in a riot of anarchic boulders.

  Then the oncoming night, the wave of blackness, the deep, slow silence. The closing down of life. Far above them the myriads of stars. This was not for humans, but for God. Up there was God’s inscrutable purpose. The others seemed to fall asleep, but he couldn’t. He was too stirred up. Again, he felt like a Kamikaze pilot taking off for his final suicide mission.

  A Desperate Venture – and Redemption?

  After a seeming eternity, Steadman stirred and began to shake the others. ‘Three o’clock, men. Time to go!’

  For John it felt like the hour of doom: the condemned criminal wakened to face his execution.

  They packed up, and after nibbling a few pieces of dry bread, shouldered their packs and followed Steadman into the threatening blackness above them, clambering up easy but precarious gullies, which sliced their stony and crumbling ways through the cliff bands.

  Slowly the dawn came. To John it seemed as if the world was being reborn in a new and evil form. Crudely formed, cruel mountains emerged from the blackness. It was almost like resurrection on the Day of Judgement. Waking up and finding the green, comforting world of your earthly life transformed into a grim and brutal world where there was no hope of Redemption, but only awe and dread. The mountain face seemed to be getting steadily steeper and ever more malignant as it curled above them like a gigantic wave on a windy day, hanging momentarily in the air before crashing down and hurling them to oblivion.

  The little gullies degenerated into little more than large cracks, and they found themselves clambering up increasingly smooth slabs which led up towards a sheer overhanging cliff. Running right across the mountain face, it barred all further progress. A narrow gully slicing down through it seemed to be the only breach in its formidable defences. That, apparently, was what Steadman was heading for. To John, however, it seemed impossibly difficult.

  Then, glancing to his left, he saw that, some way below them, a series of broad, rubble-covered ledges led into the top of the canyon, which by now had degenerated into little more than a big groove. Beyond it, further to the left, easy-angled slopes swept up past the edge of the cliff and reared gracefully up to a sharply pointed summit.

  ‘Bob!’ he called out. ‘Oughtn’t we to be going that way? I mean, it’s much easier!’ The words just slipped out of his mouth.

  Steadman rounded angrily on him. ‘John, do stop showing off for once in your life! We’re on the correct route, so just shut up!’

  ‘Yeah, sussed!’ sneered Jim.

  John blushed bright red. Squashed again.

  Up they went, scrambling up a narrow crack and then teetering up a knobbly slab at 45 degrees. John looked down and felt a spurt of terror ripple through him; a bit like an electric shock. A huge void had opened out beneath them; one slip, one careless move, and you’d go tumbling down… to what? Horrible, unthinkable pain and injury… death… oblivion. He began to feel sick. It was that awful Greenhill feeling of utter helplessness before brute force, that feeling of paralysis that seeped into you like a blinding headache.

  He glanced at Rob and saw that he was white and visibly trembling. Big, beefy and uncoordinated, Rob was made for fighting, not for delicate rock climbing. Here was an ally in fear.

  ‘Rob!’ he called out. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Fuck off, will yer!’ In his extremity of humiliating fear Rob was not prepared to confess to weakness in front of a poofter. That was just too much for an already wounded ego to bear.

  They clawed their way up an even steeper slab and reached a broad, rubble-strewn ledge. The cliff loomed over them, smooth and relentlessly hostile. The gully they’d been aiming for was revealed as a mere groove which petered out into a blank, holdless overhang.

  ‘No way we’re gerrin’ up that!’ exclaimed Rob in a high-pitched falsetto squeal, quite unlike his normal deep bass.

  Wild-eyed and looking even more manic, Steadman eyed the scene. Then he spoke in a soft and gentle voice. ‘Chaps, I seem to have made a boob.’

  ‘Where now?’ asked a tremulous Jim, not quite terrified, but obviously badly shaken.

  ‘We’ll just have to go back down those slabs and try to work our way round to the left,’ replied Steadman, in an unconvincing ‘put-a-brave-face-on-things’ voice.

  Rob cast a horrified glance at the slab they’d just negotiated. ‘Ah’ll niver get doon that, me! No way!’

  John noticed that he was shaking and that tears were trickling down his cheeks.

  ‘Come on,’ said Steadman in his gentle voice, ‘I’ll rope you up. You’ll be perfectly safe.’

  He pulled a climbing rope out of his rucksack, uncoiled it and tied it round the trembling youth’s middle.

  ‘Now, down you go. You’re perfectly safe. I’ve got you.’

  ‘No you fuckin’ ain’t! There’s no fuckin’ belay! If I slip I’ll jus’ pull yers off!’

  ‘Oh come on! You’ll have to go. We can’t stay here.’

  A wild, panic-stricken yell: ‘Yer fuckin’ clueless bastadd! We’s fuckin’ stuck, ain’t we?’

  John studied the wild-eyed, violently shaking lump. Not since ‘Army Barmy’ Martin’s celebrated fre
ak-out on the Isle of Rhum three years before had he seen anything like this. Fear was like an acid, which dissolved you. Here was big, hard man Rob, reduced to a Martin-style lump of jelly. How were the mighty fallen.

  Impasse. Now what?

  Just then he glanced to the right. The ledge they were on led in an erratic way towards a protruding rocky rib, which plunged down from the cliff and shut off any further views in that direction. Unlike the cliff, it was not smooth, but was a tumble of big boulders, full of easy footholds and handholds. The ledge, itself, though poised over a terrifying void of steep slabs and vertical cliffs, looked negotiable. There were plenty of conveniently placed footholds and firm handholds. He had a sudden inspiration.

  ‘Bob!’ he called out. ‘I think there could be an easy way over there. Could I go and have a look?’

  For a moment, no reply came. The humanoid landmine seemed to be ticking ominously away. He braced himself for the coming explosion and humiliating put-down.

  But instead, there came a calm and reassuring voice. ‘Good lad, John. Well, off you go and have a look.’

  John glanced at the awful void beneath the ledge. It was like the slobbering jaws of a Tyrannosaurus waiting to gobble you up. One careless mistake, one wrong move and… oblivion! Fear began to well up within him.

  ‘Bob!’ he said. ‘Can you tie me onto the rope and give me a belay?’

  ‘You don’t need a belay,’ replied Steadman in his now gentle voice. ‘You’re a good rock climber. You can manage without. Here’s your chance to prove yourself. So off you go!’

  Steadman seemed to want him to cross that ledge unprotected. Why? It was like one of those section attacks at the army camps when the Sergeant ordered the ‘Mongs’ to stick his head out of cover to draw the enemy’s fire and reveal his position. ‘Mongs’ were the expendable idiots. So was he expendable? He hesitated.

  ‘Go on,’ said Steadman. ‘You’re not scared, are you?’

  Yes, he was scared. Bloody petrified, if the truth were known! But then, this was the way that Mekon had won his Military Medal. So, no choice!

  Heart thumping, all senses acute, everything hyped-up to super infra red alert, he picked his way carefully along that ledge. Don’t look down! Fight down that fear which will turn you into a wobbling jelly! It’s easy, one firm hold following another like the sentences in a book.