by Clint Willis
DUNAGIRI STOOD IN the Garwhal Himalaya, just across from Changabang. The mountain had been climbed once—back in 1939—but Joe and Dick had their eye on a new and far more difficult route. They had almost no money, so poverty as much as climbing ethics dictated the tiny scale of their expedition. Joe bought a dilapidated van for 170 pounds, ignoring an engineer’s report that included this sentence: The best way of using this van to reach the Himalayas is to drive it to Heathrow and fly.
The two climbers stuffed the van with gear and food and set off, taking the ferry to France and then driving overland to India—6,000 miles in three weeks. They listened to Bob Dylan; Dick’s classical tapes couldn’t compete with the noise of the van. They lived on chapatis, sandwich spread, canned meat and—when they could find it—local produce.
Joe found himself envying the hashish-smoking drifters they encountered on the road; these people seemed unburdened by the sort of ambition he carried. At the same time, he felt shame at his inability to match Dick’s spartan ethic. Joe felt a hedonist because he wanted to spend money on ordinary bread when Dick was content with chapatis. Joe also tormented himself with thoughts of his inadequacy for the task ahead. They’d had news before leaving England that another two-man expedition—the famous Tyrolean climber Reinhold Messner and his equally celebrated partner, the Austrian Peter Habeler—had climbed Hidden Peak (8,068 meters; 26,471 feet). Joe could not imagine himself in such company.
The two young British climbers, with their sloppy attire and shoestring budget, did not impress the bureaucrats at the headquarters of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF) in Delhi. It took the better part of a week to muster the necessary permissions to proceed to Dunagiri. Joe and Dick met an English trekker named Peter Roberts, who offered to come along as porter and help manage Base Camp. Meanwhile the IMF at last assigned the expedition a liaison officer, an athletics instructor named Inder Kapoor.
Joe and Dick had been gone from England for six weeks when the four men piled into the van to drive up the Rishi Ganga. They hired ten porters in the villages of Latia and Reni, where the road ended. Joe after two days of walking developed a toothache and a bad fever. The others continued toward Base Camp while a porter escorted Joe, half-delirious, back down to an army compound in the village of Joshimath. An orderly gave him injections of penicillin from a syringe stored in a glass of dirty water. Joe lay in a dark, stinking room and took his injections twice a day. His fever abated but he was possessed by a numb sense of loss that surprised and frightened him. He hadn’t known how much he needed to climb this mountain.
His jaw remained swollen and sore. The doctor at Joshimath urged him to return to Great Britain. Joe agreed to do so, but instead set off to rejoin Dick. He walked alone, drawn up the Rishi Gorge by views of Nanda Devi. He turned up a valley and on the second day came to a clearing and found a note from Dick indicating the track toward Base Camp. That afternoon he encountered Dick himself, come down to find Joe and escort Peter Roberts back to civilization. The trekker had been terribly lonely with only the taciturn Renshaw for company. The two climbers parted with Peter, and walked up to Base Camp together. Joe felt his strength return as he walked. He could not repress an animal certainty that his troubles were over, that climbing the mountain would be a simple and joyous undertaking.
THEY CHOSE A route up the Southeast Spur, which included a very long section of steep rock. They had to move quickly; it was now late September. They built a shelter of stones and plastic tarp, and left some supplies there. They moved their tent up to a spot that was a two hours’ walk from the foot of their route; this would serve as Advance Base Camp.
A snowstorm held them up for a day. They set off the next morning. They climbed in a gully for several hours, until falling rocks drove them out of it and onto more difficult ground; this eventually brought them onto the Southeast Ridge itself. They had made a good start, climbing roughly 1,000 feet in a day.
They carried a light bivouac tent, but they didn’t pitch it; there was no wind and they preferred to sleep in the open. Dunagiri’s neighbor Changabang had come into view as they climbed. They watched it darken from white into gold and orange, passing into red. The twilight was translucent, the color of water.
The climbing on their ridge seemed reasonable. They had tackled worse in the Alps, though not at this height—they were now more than 19,000 feet above sea level. They figured on another three days to reach the summit, then two days to descend by an easier route—the route of the peak’s first ascent thirty-six years before.
They covered another 1,000 feet the second day, making their way up a series of granite towers to reach a small ledge. It was windy; snow flurries danced around their heads. They pitched their tent. The summit faded from their thoughts. Joe felt an unfamiliar patience; it made him think of the saints whose invisible presence had haunted his family and informed his schooling. He thought of the saints’ patient suffering as he enjoyed his own comforts, his warm drink and his piece of fruitcake.
They continued to climb; everything took longer than they had hoped. Time as much as disappeared. An entire day vanished; neither climber could recall how they had spent the third day on the route. Joe at one point believed that they had climbed the steepest section, but they hadn’t. They came to the start of it at the end of their fourth day on the peak. They camped there in a square pit they dug in snow. Joe made a mess trying to open sardines with a Swiss army knife; Dick had left the only decent can opener behind to save weight. They bickered and fussed about who was to blame for the mess and who should sleep on which side of the tent.
Joe took the lead in the morning. There was ice at first, but then bare rock. His crampons made climbing more difficult here but the terrain was too steep for him to stop and remove them. He pulled onto a hollow flake—an enormous and unstable slab of rock almost entirely detached from the cliff—and entered a chimney. He climbed slowly, in pain from his half-frozen fingers. He could not retreat; there was nowhere to make a rappel anchor. He was near the end of his strength when he found a ledge.
The climbers made slow progress that day, and spent a difficult night on a narrow, icy platform. They climbed more steep rock in the morning. They half-expected to finish the climb before nightfall, but they were moving too slowly now. The sunsets no longer uplifted them; they watched the sun’s sinking with dull anxious eyes. They dragged the thin air into their lungs and wished for more. It was hard not to give way to weakness; not to simply give up. They bivouacked as night fell; they were now a few hundred feet below the summit. It seemed a long way.
They set off again in the morning. Joe took less than an hour to finish the route. He reached the summit and looked back for his partner. Dick was 40 meters away, lying on his back in the snow. He looked dead. He had simply stopped to lie down and stare at the sky. He stood and walked up to where Joe waited. Dick apologized. This evidence of his condition surprised and alarmed both of them.
Their spirits seemed to flicker within their exhausted bodies as they looked around them. Nanda Devi, stern and elegant, jutted through clouds to return their gaze. Joe thought of the head of some beautiful beast. Changabang’s summit, domelike, also lay before them, as did the top of Kalanka. The clouds below them stretched to the horizon as the climbers looked down the Southwest Ridge, the route they had chosen for their descent.
It frightened them now. They worried that they might fall through a cornice on the unfamiliar ridge. They revised their plan. They would sleep just below the summit tonight and then descend the way they’d come.
They felt little joy at their achievement and no wish to stay on the summit. There was some relief that they would not have to go higher but their weariness and a simmering fear overshadowed it. They were short of food and they had run out of fuel for the stove. The absence of fuel meant they could not melt snow for water; without water they would deteriorate very quickly.
It was happening now. The next day saw them only part of the way down the steep rock b
arrier near the top of their route. The passage of time assumed yet another dimension: time flirted and poked at them and withdrew. Joe felt immensely frustrated. He felt at all times that he and Dick were in hopeless pursuit of someone. They were burdened with some message to deliver but the object of their chase was unresponsive to their shouts and pleas to wait, to relieve them of their work. This fantasy deepened a sense of failure that he could not attribute to anything else.
The climbers wandered in sun and fog performing their various tasks: setting up a rappel anchor, descending the rope, retrieving the rope, then repeating the process. They moved earthward in a stupefied wonder as if descending toward the unknown. They did not speak to make decisions. They both knew what to do.
They stopped at a tiny ledge. They didn’t want the snacks they still carried. Their throats had gone as hard and dry as old bread. The two of them slept and woke and started down again. It was hard to find cracks for the pitons they still carried, whose clanking made echoes in the hollow sky. This work was difficult but they had done it many times on other mountains.
They came to a traverse spanned by a sheet of ice. Joe led it. His legs barely held his weight. There was the risk of a long swinging fall. He chopped a small ledge and stood on it to place an ice piton and climbed on; only then did he come off. He rode an arc across 40 feet; he was not surprised by it and there was no fear—this was expected—but he was surprised at the sound: the jangle of hardware, the rush of air. It stopped. He dangled from his screw and glanced down at the view—another 4,000 feet to the glacier—and scanned his body; there was nothing new, nothing torn or broken. He regained the ice and relied on tension from the peg to help him across into snow. He climbed the snow to bare rock, where he placed several more pitons.
Dick fell trying to follow him, but the anchor held. The cold and their fatigue and especially their dehydration made them incompetent. The rope grew tangled as they made their way toward their next bivouac site. Joe set up a tent and got into his sleeping bag. Dick remained outside in the moonlight. He inventoried the remaining food and made vague comments about the view. It didn’t occur to Joe that something was wrong.
Dick drifted into the tent and tried to eat bits of chocolate in the dark; he gnawed at his fingers, mistaking them for the candy. He woke Joe in the morning and showed him torn fingers that had turned blue and hard from frostbite.
They waited for the sun. It appeared, and they commenced the third day of their descent. Joe set up the rappels. Dick could do nothing to help. He insisted on an early halt and the climbers suffered through a cramped, semihanging bivouac. Joe was angry at his own predicament but in the morning he looked around a corner and saw that Dick had spent the night on a ledge so small he’d been unable to get into his sleeping bag. Dick had instead crouched on the ledge in his crampons, nursing his frozen fingers and growing colder as the night wore on. Joe was pierced by shame at this fresh evidence of his own selfishness, his lack of consideration for his suffering friend.
They had lost track of time again; neither man knew how long it was since they’d stood on the summit. Joe felt a part of himself fade and die. He didn’t mind what he lost. He only wanted to stop suffering; he wished to step off the wheel. His growing belief that he and Dick were meant to die on this mountain awakened in him an almost desperate craving for some form of liberation.
The climbers moved with difficulty. They stumbled more frequently even as they reached easier ground and drank in the thicker air of lower altitude. Dick seemed better, but Joe felt himself slipping away and he asked for a rest in the middle of the day. The two of them salvaged crumbs from food wrappers. They mixed oats with snow in Dick’s cup and ate the mush; it was very good.
They resumed their descent. The ground became more difficult than they had remembered. They stopped for the night when Joe couldn’t continue. There was room to lie down and they spoke to each other—it seemed to Joe that they hadn’t done so in a long time. Dick took note of a vein of crystal in the rock, and he wondered aloud what they’d climb next. Joe knew that Dick had his eye on Changabang’s West Face. The two of them had gazed awestruck at the face during the approach to Dunagiri; in their innocence they had even talked of climbing Changabang after they’d knocked off this peak.
Joe promised himself—he spoke aloud—that he wouldn’t put himself in this situation again. He would not do it for a climb, not for anything. He wanted only ease and comfort. His thirst woke him three times in the night. He stuffed snow in his mouth to try to stop the horrible burning there and heard Dick doing the same. Dick went back to sleep and dreamed of an accident. He came awake convinced that a helicopter rescue was in progress around the corner from the bivouac site. He woke Joe to ask him if he heard the voices.
They slept again. The sun rose. The climbers woke and ate more of their snow-mush. They were beginning to hope that they would survive the descent. They set off and Dick slipped, twisting his ankle. He didn’t tell Joe. Dick’s fingers had begun to torment him. He took pills for the pain. The climbers came to the top of the gully that would lead them to flat ground. Joe looked down and decided against it. He had spotted an alternate route that would bring them to the glacier sooner, though it meant a longer walk on the glacier itself.
Dick said no and set off down the gully alone. Joe headed down his shortcut, and soon came to a cliff. He took out a length of rope and made an anchor and rappelled the cliff and then he slid on his backside to the edge of the glacier. He began walking and realized that he had forgotten about the crevasses; no one would know where to look for his body if he fell into one now. He cursed as he peered through his scratched sunglasses, searching for telltale shadows on the surface of the snow. He stumbled on and nothing happened. He found a rock with a pool of water on top. He broke through a glaze of ice and mixed water from the puddle with his remaining bits of oats and chocolate. He spooned the mush into his mouth. An American family took shape in the glimmer of sun on snow and watched him eat. There was a young boy and he was disdainful; he disapproved of Joe’s greed.
Changabang hung like a mural against the sky. It looked unbelievably difficult. Joe found his camera and took a picture of it but he was finished with mountains of this kind.
Other specters joined the Americans and everyone walked with Joe as he made his way toward Base Camp. They watched him with some of the cold puzzlement of ghosts but they seemed at moments engaged by his struggle—not without feeling. Their company distracted and reassured him. He knew he was going to live—the chocolate and the oats had convinced him of that—and now much of what he saw seemed newly familiar: Dunagiri at his back and this jumble of boulders and dirt at his feet.
He walked on in a mood of extraordinary acceptance. He cared what happened to him, but only a little. The American family didn’t speak to him; they spoke about him but only to one another. He heard them complain that he was slow, but they offered him no assistance. He wondered peevishly why they didn’t offer to take his rucksack.
He left the rucksack on the ground and kept walking. His route across the glacier had taken him behind a small satellite peak but now Dunagiri hove back into view. He recognized the valley that led to Base Camp. He made his way down. He felt the lurching oddness of his gait. He imagined himself as a toddler in the body of a very old man. He had to stop walking and his body shook briefly with some unfamiliar joyless version of amusement. He looked up and here was Base Camp.
Dick had not arrived. He might have stopped to eat at the tent near the base of their route. Joe ate from tins of fruit and meat and lay with water and chocolate near him in the dark. Thoughts glowed and streaked as if his mind were a galaxy, a vast darkness interrupted by light that smoldered and flashed at unimaginable intervals. His sense of safety and of ease amid this wonder was too glorious to waste on sleep. He left his sleeping bag once, to move his bowels, but it was too late. He went back to his sleeping bag without bothering to clean himself up properly—he could not find the strength to undr
ess.
Dick didn’t appear in the morning. Joe began to plan a rescue. He packed medical supplies in case Dick had hurt himself in the gully—and then Dick hobbled into camp. There was something odd about him; he was talking, making explanations. His ankle was bad, and he had been unable to find his way past a crevasse until a voice—Joe’s—had offered directions that proved useful. Dick was very concerned about his hands. The ends of his fingers were black.
Joe gave him antibiotics. Dick rested a day and subsided into his familiar silence. Joe hiked up to the tent at Advance Base Camp to retrieve money and the keys to the van. Dick needed to leave now; he had to find a hospital and try to save his fingers. He would send porters back for the gear.
Joe was sad to part with Dick—there was an understanding between them that might not arise again. He waited alone at Base Camp for six days, too weary to explore his surroundings. He did set out once to have a look at Changabang but his battered feet didn’t take him far. A creature of some kind, an animal, made its way into the food bags after dark. One night the animal upset Joe by eating a piece of fruitcake Joe had saved to treat himself.
The porters arrived. There were only two of them—Joe had expected three—and one was nearly useless. The porters smoked hashish in the mornings. The party walked into a snowstorm one day; another day they got lost and bushwhacked for hours through thickets that tore at their faces and clothing. They arrived in Joshimath. Joe stayed in the room where he had been treated for his infection. That episode seemed like something from a dream in another life. He could not stop looking at things and at faces; they seemed as real to him as if he had been born without vision and had recovered it now. This new condition was at once exhilarating and terribly sad. He was afraid of what he might see and also afraid that he might waste or lose this gift, that he might once again become blind. He understood that the shape of his fear—this obvious metaphor—was related to his awareness of his mother’s blindness and to his own damaged vision. Someone else might experience this new way of being differently, perhaps as a new way of being in the body or in relation to the world. He understood that this gift did not free him of his past but it seemed to thrust him toward the present; the newness of that was as much as he could stand.
