Far, Far the Mountain Peak

by Arthur Clifford

  So to the rib. An easy clamber up the big, tumbled boulders. Footholds and handholds like a gigantic staircase. On to its wobbly top, and on to the far side where a crumbly slab abutted against the cliff band… and then, salvation! Here the sheer face was slashed by an easy-angled gully, rocky, boulder-filled and, with its mass of big hand and footholds, little more than a glorified ladder. Clearly visible above it were broad and easy slopes sweeping up to an airy, tapering summit cone.

  He felt a wave of sheer exultation flash through him. ‘Thank you, God!’ he muttered, ‘Thank you! I should have known you’d come to my rescue!’

  With infinite care, he clambered back over the rib and along the ledge to where the others were waiting.

  ‘It’s OK!’ he called out, ‘There’s an easy way to the top over that rib!’

  ‘Right lads!’ said Steadman in a strained voice. ‘Follow John along the ledge!’

  Rob, however, refused to move and clung desperately to his stance. ‘I’m not gannin’ along that!’

  Steadman immediately took charge of the situation. ‘John, tie yourself onto the rope. You know, bowline, the way I taught you… that’s right! Now, go over to the rib and give us a belay.’

  Promotion! Restored to favour! John obeyed with alacrity. Reassured by the rope, he crept carefully along to the ledge. Reaching the rib, he found an almost perfect knob of rock. Testing it out, he found it was firm and slipped the belay over it. Hauling the rope in, he called out, as he had been taught by Steadman. ‘Climb when you’re ready!’

  ‘Climbing now!’ replied Steadman. ‘Come on Rob, old man, you’re perfectly safe! John’s holding you and so am I.’

  With that, he heaved the protesting adolescent lump to his feet and gently shepherded him along the ledge. ‘This hand here… Now left foot there… Right foot here. We’re winning! We’re winning!’

  Reaching John, Rob collapsed in a sullen heap. Steadman returned along the ledge to collect Jim, who refused to tie himself onto the rope and clambered deftly over to John, ostentatiously scorning the void beneath him. Obviously, he resented John’s success.

  Clambering over the big, inviting boulders of the rib, they reached the bottom of the gully. Steadman eyed it and let out an audible sigh of relief. His craggy face broke into a broad grin.

  ‘Right, Jonny boy,’ he said. ‘You shin up that and give us a belay. It shouldn’t be difficult, but do be careful! Give us a shout when you’re ready!’

  While a silent Jim glowered sullenly at him, John began to clamber up the gully. It was reassuringly easy with big, comfortable hand and footholds within easy reach and plenty of room for his body. Only at the top was there an awkward bit. An especially large boulder had wedged itself between the enclosing walls of rock, but a big, jagged gap to its left offered hope. Squeezing himself into it, with his back pressed against the smooth wall of the gully, he found himself faced with a multitude of little knobs and ledges. It was almost like a climbing frame in a kids’ playground back home. Wriggling his way upwards, he duly emerged from the shadow into brilliant sunshine. There before him was… the promised salvation: the easy, gravelly slopes leading up to the sharp, rocky summit. He’d done it!

  In a burst of excitement, he pulled out the camera and indulged in an orgy of photography. Then, finding another conveniently placed rock spike, he went through the elaborate belaying routine he’d been taught.

  ‘Climb when you’re ready!’

  ‘Climbing now!’

  Slowly and gently, Steadman coaxed the nervous, complaining Rob up the gully. ‘Left foot there… Here’s a good handhold… Careful now! You’re all right! John’s holding you on the rope.’

  This was hardly soothing his wounded ego! Hauled up by an effin’ poofter? Fuckin’ ’ell!

  A predictable crisis occurred when they reached the big boulder. Rob was too bulky to fit easily into the gap. ‘Ah can’t fuckin’ move! Fuckin’ stuck! Crap route this, Jonny lad!’

  ‘Go on, try!’ said Steadman.

  ‘Ah’m fuckin’ stuck!’

  His large backside wedged sideways between the walls of the gap, Rob’s arms and legs thrashed wildly in the air. Ignoring the torrent of obscenities, Steadman grabbed a flailing right foot and firmly placed it in a large hold and, seizing a thrashing right arm, he manoeuvred it carefully towards a big jug-handle handhold. Then, wriggling underneath the quivering body, he pushed hard on the elephantine backside that was wobbling above him.

  ‘Go on! I’ve got you! Pull hard, John!’

  Grunts, gasps, obscenities, frantic wriggling and thrashings about, and then almost like a cork in a bottle, Rob burst out into sunshine above and lay panting on the gravel.

  ‘Well done, Rob!’ cried John. ‘You’ve made it!’

  ‘Trust you to choose a crap route!’ growled Rob when he finally recovered his breath.

  Jim arrived next, romping up the gully with a positively aristocratic disdain for any difficulties. Without even looking at John, he sat down next to Rob. Steadman followed.

  ‘There’s the summit!’ cried John. ‘Lads, we’ve made it!’

  Rob didn’t reply. Jim flashed a ferocious scowl. John felt a bewildered despair. They seemed to resent his success. Could he do anything right with them? Still at square one.

  An easy walk up the gravelly slopes and a short scramble up some steepish rocks brought them quickly to the top.

  ‘Well done, lads!’ exclaimed Steadman, beaming and shaking hands vigorously.

  ‘Well, John,’ he added. ‘So you managed to cope with a real cliff band after all! Satisfied now, are we?’

  ‘Yeah, Bob! You bet! Thanks, Bob! Thanks!’

  For a glorious moment of enhanced life, John wallowed in blissful euphoria. A real mountaineer now! Bob had returned to normal and was his surrogate dad once more. Things were back on track.

  He beamed at Steadman and began to speak. ‘I —’

  But without a word Steadman turned away and began a huddled conversation with the other two. John tried to join in, but was simply ignored. The euphoria dissolved in a flash. He was still out in the cold. Things were still crazy. Why, for Heaven’s sake? He’d proved himself tough and brave – or so he thought, anyway! But even that wasn’t enough! What more did he have to do to be accepted?

  Disconsolately he looked around him. Almost immediately the sheer enormity of the prospect before him softened his bruised feelings. How petty human squabbles were! Up here he was in the presence of something far bigger than himself. All around him was a stormy sea of jagged mountains, a harsh and brutal riot of rampaging rock. Contorted, unformed, unfinished, untamed… it surged away and lost itself in a dim, blue distance. ‘You’re nothing,’ the mountains seemed to be saying. ‘We’re what matters, not you. We’re far older than you are, but we’re still in our early childhood. When you’re gone we’ll still be growing up. One day we’ll be bigger even than the Himalayas, but all you’ll be is a heap of dust, or maybe even a fossil if you’re very lucky.’

  A soft wind caressed their lonely perch. Far away to the south was the yellow emptiness of the Sahara Desert. Here, beneath the immense blue dome of the sky, the solitude was the solitude of the open sea.

  Alpha Males

  The opposite side of the mountain was very different. Broad, stony slopes swept easily downwards, speckled here and there by the odd crag and cliff band, all readily bypassed. Having driven them almost to their limit, the mountain seemed willing to let them go with a minimum of fuss.

  They met the others in the brown, sun-baked valley below. Morris seemed almost disappointed to see them. Michael seemed relieved. The two girls screeched and whooped and smothered Jim and Rob in a deluge of hugs and kisses.

  When Tracy finally disentangled herself from Rob’s amorous tentacles, she rushed over to John and hugged him. ‘Eeeee! Yorra real hero, ye!’

  John
responded with a flurry of kisses. But as they extracted themselves from their mutual embrace, a surly Rob approached him.

  ‘Leave her alern! Yin’s not for poofs!’

  That stung. ‘I’m not a bloody poof!’ he growled. ‘I got you up the mountain, didn’t I?’

  Rob clenched his fists. ‘Wanna fight, son? I’ll take you any day!’

  John backed off. Discretion, he decided, was the better part of valour. He knew he couldn’t fight Rob. He would only be sent sprawling on the ground. Memories of that ghastly playground at Greenhill flitted through his brain. At the same time, a feeling of hopelessness filled him. He desperately wanted to be friends with Rob and Jim, but whatever he did, nothing seemed to work. He’d led them out of danger, found the way to the top of the mountain… yet that only seemed to enflame their hostility still further. Mad!

  He remembered a film he’d seen about mountain gorillas in Africa. They went round in small gangs each led by a big macho male, what was officially called an ‘alpha male’. Other alpha males weren’t friends: they were rivals to be seen off. Slowly the dismal penny dropped. It was the same here. Rob and Jim were the alpha males and he was the outsider to be seen off. They were Geordies, and toughness was their exclusive property. People with posh accents were poofs. Always had been, always would be. If they happened to be as tough as you, they were rivals that had to be squashed. End of argument.

  Madness?

  A short way down the valley they found a broad pool of green grass beside a small stream. Here they settled down and made a fire. Mahomet, the donkey man, produced a cornucopia of meat, vegetables, dates and almonds out of a bag, and pouring it all into a big earthenware bowl brewed up a vast, spicy tagine.

  As the sun went down and the shadows lengthened, Steadman seemed to go into a kind of trance, staring ahead of him and snapping at anybody who tried to speak to him. Suddenly he got up and marched resolutely over the brow of a nearby spur.

  ‘Now Bob’s got the shits!’ declared Rob. ‘An’ serves him bloody right an’ all for eatin’ all this Pakkie crap!’

  Night fell, the moon rose and they settled down for a night under the stars. Steadman didn’t return.

  After an hour of semi-sleep John returned to full consciousness. The tagine and the long day’s exercise were having their effect and the internal traffic was on the move. Getting up, he scrambled over the adjoining spur.

  The mission successfully accomplished, he ambled back towards the bivouac. Rounding a big rock, he was confronted with what seemed to be a vision from the distant past. The brilliant moon bathed the vast, shadowy mountainside in a soft, silvery light. There on his knees, his hands locked in an attitude of fervent prayer, was Steadman.

  As he beat his breast and gazed intently at the sky, he seemed, for all the world, like a picture out of a history book, a medieval knight at vigil or a crusader taking his vows. ‘Oh Lord,’ he said in a loud and clear voice. ‘Accept me as I am. Forgive my weaknesses. Calm my wild and evil passions. Show me the right path.’

  John just gaped. Just as Michael had said, Bob really had gone nutty! Just what had got into him?

  Crisis and Remorse

  Had John but known it, the answer was: quite a lot. The Reverend Robert Steadman, M.A. D.D, Ph D. – and all the rest of it! – was having an identity crisis. His life had reached a turning point. More than ever, the wild places were calling him. His suburban parish on the outskirts of Boldonbridge was not for him. It was a bowl of sticky treacle which sucked him down into a deadening nullity. Here, amid the harsh mountain crags and scorched desert wastes, was the reality he sought: hard, unforgiving nature, which alone provided a test worthy of him. Only when your body was pushed to its uttermost limit could you experience true spirituality. At heart he was a desert anchorite, not a suburban social worker.

  And, again, there were these wild Berbers. Ignorant, bigoted, crassly superstitious… they were all of this, yet they had a deeper sense of reality than the suburban sophisticates of Calderbridge. You didn’t have to apologise for mentioning God. To them, God was simply reality. You didn’t airbrush death and eternity out in the name of ‘mental hygiene’. You accepted them face to face.

  And there was something else which continually tormented him. John, the ridiculously beautiful. John, his soul mate. For days now he’d tried to banish him from his presence. Rudeness, cruel cutting remarks, rejection, he’d tried it all, but still the youth hung around him, unable to take the hint. And it wasn’t only a physical presence: John invaded his sleep. He was there in his dreams, every night, cavorting round, bewitching him. ‘Be true to yourself! You’ll never be able to marry a woman, so marry me. Consummate the marriage. It’s perfectly normal. It’s what the Spartan warriors used to do with pretty young boys. Why not?’ That path, he knew, led to catastrophe; to shame, ridicule, prison and the squalor of paedophile register. It was the Song of the Sirens luring him to ruin.

  And it was all so petty and sordid. He’d done his share of ‘Paedophile Awareness’ courses. Long-term strategies: be kind to your prey; become a father figure in whom they will confide and then, when you’ve softened them up, pounce! By befriending him and bringing him, he’d done just that! By now he’d come to hate the youth for exposing him for what he really was. Not spiritual, but a mere paedophile all but consumed by his animal lusts. In his dreams, he saw him jeering at him.

  A Demon?

  The events of the day shamed him. In his desperation to find a physical challenge worthy of him, he had deliberately chosen an unknown and dangerous route up Aksoual Mountain, regardless of his responsibility for the safety of his youthful charges. And when confronted by failure in the shape of that overhanging cliff, what had he done? The true answer pained and horrified him so much that he hardly dared to admit it even to himself. He coaxed and flattered John Denby, an innocent youth, into crossing a dangerously exposed ledge, without the protection of a safety rope, in hope that he might stumble and fall to his death.

  In that way he would rid himself of the tempter that was luring him to destruction. Of course, an appalling row would follow, but he could soft-soap the coroner into believing it was all a terrible accident, beyond his control. An undisciplined and hyperactive John Denby had wilfully ignored his entreaties and dashed off along that ledge. After all, he’d disobeyed his teacher, Joe Morris, and charged off up the Jebel Toubkal without permission, hadn’t he? He was just that kind of a lad, wasn’t he? Perhaps he shouldn’t have taken him mountaineering, but, well, he’d given him the benefit of the doubt in a good Christian way and he would make a great show of sorrow over the tragic death of such a promising young man.

  A coroner would swallow it – and so would a jury – but God wouldn’t. You couldn’t soft-soap God! Alone on that moonlit mountainside, he was filled with shame and self-disgust. The Publican in the Temple. ‘Oh Lord, forgive me for what I am! Make me a better person.’

  Trouble Brewing

  An anti-climax day followed. It was a gentle amble over a big mountain pass and then a matter of following an ancient trail down a long valley. A stream bubbled noisily down through a land of large, rounded mountains, sun-bleached and increasingly dry.

  As the glorious photo opportunities appeared, one after the other, John indulged himself in an orgy of photography. It was partly to illustrate the book he was planning to write, and partly to take his mind off the increasingly unpleasant tensions within the group. Rob and Jim were more hostile than ever and had corralled the girls into a tight-knit clique from which he was excluded. Michael had joined them. And to crown everything, that morning Steadman had been viciously rude to him, for no apparent reason. At long last he had come to hate him. That left him with only one possible friend: the other excluded pariah, Morris.

  ‘You mean to say that Bob took you up the wrong route and lost his way, and that you, a minor had to rescue everybody?’

  Clearly Morris
was gathering ammunition for a long-planned counter-attack, just as Michael had predicted. Full of bile, John supplied all the juicy details, chapter and verse, and with compound interest.

  ‘Yeah! When Rob collapsed, I had to find a way out of the mess we’d got into. Bob just hadn’t a clue. I mean he’d led us into a mess and then… Well, he just gave up.’

  Spiteful? Full of malice? Yes! But true? That depended on what you called ‘the truth’.

  Plots. Intrigue. Revenge. Trouble brewing.

  Human Frailty: Gut Rot

  Then the long-heralded gut rot struck, followed by a frantic dash for cover. Which, by Sod’s Law, happened to be conspicuously lacking at that precise moment. The net result was being observed in full squat by a jeering Jim.

  ‘Your turn at last? Mighta chose a berra place like? Or mebbe’s yer likes showin’ us yer bum? Figures doan it?’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  ‘Watch yersell, son!’

  John seethed with anger. Bloody hell, he’d tried to be sympathetic when Jim had got the gut rot! So sympathetic, in fact, that he’d given away all his anti-squitter pills. And small thanks he’d got for that act of altruism! There seemed to be one law for him and one law for them. He comforted himself by slipping in a ‘heroic explorer’ fantasy. David Livingstone dying of dysentery in the wilds of Africa. If you wanted to be a real explorer then you had to suffer like him.

  More Culture Clash

  And so to Amsouzeate, an oasis of bright green fields and the usual scatter of flat-roofed, mud brick houses amid bare, brown hillsides. The now familiar routine ensued. Steadman went into a huddle with the bearded, berobed local men, talking vigorously in Berber. Meanwhile the rest of them hung around in two muttering and mutually hostile groups.

  Eventually they were ushered into one of the houses, through the bottom storey with its dung-soaked straw and greasy, stinking sheep, and up a ladder into the cushioned living room above. The usual mantras occurred.