Summit Fever

by Andrew Greig

  We were about to turn in when the French finally arrived with their gear. They went to lodge an official complaint over the way the Brits had been given preferential treatment. Unfortunately Shokat was the senior LO there and they had to present their complaint to him. He rose to the occasion superbly, was so full of wounded dignity, of sheer incredulity at this suggestion of jiggery-pokery, that the French leader ended up apologizing to him for such an insulting accusation.

  From then on Shokat was one of the team.

  Next morning, up and on the trail again. I’d picked up a cold, was running a temperature and my nose and throat burned. Nothing for it but keep taking the aspirin. It seemed a long day, following the river, climbing up away from it, descending again, sometimes on a track, sometimes boulder-hopping. It was overcast and windy, quite cold.

  After a couple of hours I went into a hermetic trance, living entirely inside myself. I threw my mind sticks and watched it chase after them: the past, the future, home, Askole, Liz waving us goodbye, the lads on the hill.

  We stopped for lunch in the windswept middle of nowhere and sat shivering behind rocks till the kettle boiled. Nobody said much. There was nothing to say.

  Off again, back into the dreamworld. The scenery was nothing to look at, and there was no time to look at it. A couple of steep sections above the river, including a slightly awkward chimney, got the adrenalin going. After that I set myself to reciting from memory the whole of my Men On Ice, the narrative poems about three crazed climbers that had got me into this mess in the first place. That passed an hour or so. Then I chatted with the French party on their way to Gasherbrum 4, then back to solitude again.

  And suddenly we were there. Paiju – a narrow strip of trees, shrubs, wild roses and long grass, running down the hill beside a stream. It looks like Paradise but it smells mostly of shit and Expedition rubbish. Tony and Mal, looking much better today, had already set themselves up; Kath and I found a ledge beside the stream, put up the tent, got the sleeping bags and toys out.

  Burt arrived a couple of hours later, helped along by Donna and Shokat. He was absolutely white, apart from a hectic red spot on either cheek. He looked like a tuberculosis victim in the terminal stage. His knee had apparently completely seized up and he’d had to be half-carried over the last awkward miles.

  The French doctor diagnosed tendonitis. Treatment? No movement for a week.

  So we had a new crisis on our hands. We joked about helicopters, or being carried in a throne to Base Camp, but Burt was very subdued. He knew this could be the end for him. Despite our differences and antagonisms, I felt very sorry for him. We’ve already shared a lot. If I hadn’t been lucky – and made the effort to keep fit – it could as easily have been me.

  We decided to take a rest day at Paiju, to give Burt a chance to recover and decide what to do, and let Mal and Tony acclimatize. They were both desperate to get to the mountain, but knew there was no point arriving there in bad shape.

  Waiting for lunch under Abdul’s tarpaulin, listening to the rain and the subdued murmur of porters. Tony and Mal hunch over a chess game, Kath writes her journal, Abdul’s hands flip out one chapati after another, but his eyes are distant. ‘Skardu?’ I ask. He nods, thinking about his wife and the baby due next week. Burt and Donna have been closeted in their tent all morning.

  After lunch, a conference at Burt’s tent. We all feel awkward and overcast as the weather while Mal outlines Burt’s options. He can wait at Paiju while we send a porter back with a request for a helicopter; they’re expensive, but luckily the insurance to pay for one is compulsory. He could be carried out. He could wait here and go back with Adrian, who’ll have to leave Base Camp in eight days to get back to Scotland to start work. He could wait here and come on up after us if his knee improves.

  I glance at Burt as Mal talks in his matter-of-fact way. He seems subdued, defeated, resigned. It’s clear he’d dropped any idea of going on. After waiting eleven days in Askole, it’s bad luck. The question of Donna remained; she’s perfectly well, and the lads have agreed she might go quite well on the hill, could be a positive asset.

  They ask for an hour to decide. We brood in silence under the tarpaulin. These developments happen so fast. One moment you’re going fine, the next you’re stranded in Askole or crippled with tendonitis and you’re out.

  Donna comes up and announces they’ve decided to summon a helicopter and both leave for Skardu in it. She’s admirably composed and stoic. No complaining about her sacrifice, the money gone for nothing, the sheer bad luck of it. She’s the strong one; all the more pity that she’ll not be on the hill with us.

  We commiserate, quite genuinely, with her and Burt. He doesn’t complain either, he’s just had enough. Shokat writes a line for the army helicopter, instructs a fast and intelligent porter and sends him off; he’s a real asset at times.

  As always – like at a death, even my father’s – the relief that it’s not you, that you’re still in the game. With stirrings of pride and thankfulness and apprehension, Kath and I look at each other and realize we’re the only bumblies left.

  ‘That’s how it is on these trips,’ Mal reflected later. ‘The weak – and the unlucky – fall by the wayside.’

  ‘That’s a bit cruel,’ Kath said.

  ‘I suppose it is.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s what happens.’

  A very typical climber’s attitude. The gentler emotions may arise – Mal is as sentimental a man as I know – but are always followed by a hard matter-of-fact realism.

  As we sat under the tarp after tea, we heard a distant rumble. It got louder. It seemed to be coming our way. Then WHOOSH and the stream beside us was in spate, overflowing its banks and rattling stones down before it. The tent! We hurried down in the dark, found the head torches and discovered our ledge had turned into a paddy field in its irrigation phase. As the rain bucketed down, we dammed off the new tributary flowing through the tent, sorted out the damp, dry and soaking clothes and sleeping bags, quite elated by the simple struggle to preserve a small dry space to lie out in.

  Finally we lay back and looked at the roof while listening to the river and the rain battering down outside. It felt very secure. I was about to doze off when I put my hand on the floor of the tent and discovered I was lying on a water bed. I looked out; the river had brushed away our little dam and was flowing energetically under the tent.

  We scrambled out, pulled up the remaining stakes and lifted the tent bodily to higher ground. Abdul passed with a lantern, doing his impression of Christ in ‘The Light of The World’. We retrieved various bits of gear from the flood, dragged everything inside and sorted it all out again. Now we had no dry clothes and no dry sleeping bags. There was nothing to be done about it tonight. We took a sleeping pill and left the world to get on with it.

  It was a subdued, late rising in Paiju camp next morning. Bedraggled porters, everyone bleary-eyed, damp and stiff. We all said our brief goodbyes to Burt and Donna, crouching at the door of their tent. I envied them for a moment, soon to be on their effortless way home.

  Three hours later, picking a way over the vast boulder moraine of the Baltoro glacier, the sun out again, I wouldn’t have changed places with anyone in the world. We were finally starting to get among the great mountains. Every hour revealed something new. That 5000-foot phallus must be Trango Tower, those crazy gleaming wigwams will be Paiju Peak, that’s Cathedral … Shit, surely that’s the Lobsang Spire that was on the cover of the last Mountain magazine! It’s all real, it’s all true.

  Kath caught up with me and we stood grinning wildly, riding a wave of euphoria. The Karakoram at last. What can you say about them?

  ‘They’re so … fucking … BIG.’

  All you can do is stand and shake your head while your eye is drawn up one Tolkienesque fantasy after another. On both sides of the glacier, soaring spears of granite, spindrift pouring from the tip as if white blood were streaming out of a rent in the sky. The tortured pyramid of Masherbrum, dri
pping miles of snow ridges down into the valley. Trango Peak for all the world like a vast, ornate Victorian jelly.

  We’ve finally been admitted into their austere, crazed, magnificently indifferent presence. Their attraction is in their repulsion, their manifest impossibility. They knock your eyes back, you feel them as a blow to the chest. They shrug and an avalanche that would wipe out an entire expedition smoulders down a slope. They don’t give a damn.

  They are killers, heartbreakers, the lovers you can never possess and never forget.

  We trudged on.

  Jon (6 July): Me, Sandy and Mohammed up to Camp 2, pitched four-man tent. Next day me and Sandy up to Camp 2, defeated about an hour from site by soft snow.

  (7 July) Sandy levers me out of bed, feeling awful, get to Camp 2, pitch tent, back to Base Camp. Long day.

  (8 July) Rest day for me and Sandy. Evening terrible, snow at Base Camp, gusting winds. Tied down Mess Tent, all gathered round candle and lanterns, singing, laughing, beating percussion on water containers and boxes, western dancing to Paki love songs …

  Happy with having put up Camp 2, now need a couple of sustained good spells. Sandy doing really well. Only one argument so far, about the position of Camp 2 – a summer storm. Getting on well, considering the pressure we could put ourselves under.

  Sandy a compulsive engineer, physically and mentally. Very strong, lots of stamina, a scribbler of plans and lists and sums on boxes, paper, tents. An all-round star.

  You’d think a long walk-in would be a very communal affair, but most of the time we live privately, inside ourselves. We’ve only a finite amount to say, so after the initial flurry of getting to know each other, we begin to space out our conversations. We know we’ll have another six weeks together. Pacing, I begin to see that a lot of it is about pacing yourself physically and mentally. This is not an Alpine three-day trip, this is a three-month expedition and I have to be alert to my body, money, the mountain, weather, other people for that entire period, or I’ll blow it.

  So though we spend day after day in close proximity, much of the time we live in our own worlds. My world is becoming more uncluttered, simplified to motion, to one foot after another, to one day after another. The past, home, have become more and more unreal and dim. They have no hold on me. I am forward going.

  Now – picking our way through the 50-mile quarry of the Baltoro glacier in the heat of the day – my world is a clear daze. It is my feet choosing between rock and rock. It is wisps of thoughts drifting across my mind like the clouds that play games of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t across Mount Paiju. It is wind and sunlight drying sweat from the skin. It is this little band of porters and climbers, for all the world like motley pilgrims, picking our way across the threshold of the throne room of the gods.

  The Baltoro is rock around the clock, endless rock, rock without end, amen … Left foot, right foot … knee’s getting stiff again – tendonitis? – only two days from Mustagh, I’ll get there if I have to fucking crawl … wonder how they’re doing up there, are they getting all the bad weather, could set us back a week, that … I’m the only bumbly climber left. Is there room for me? Wish Kath didn’t have to leave with Adrian, I’ll miss her support … She’ll meet me at Edinburgh Airport, we’ll go out for a meal … or a beer … Hope Mum’s all right … Mustagh in two days, then we’ll see …

  And so trekking thoughts form and drift as trekking hours pass. Emptiness filled and emptied again, inner conversations with silence in the wilderness.

  The sword of Damocles was nothing to the rocks of Lilligo. Our camp site that evening was below sheer walls of mud studded with boulders roughly the size and shape of television sets. I was too tired to worry much about sitting with Abdul round the fire he’d lit directly at the base of them – until there was a slithering, a clattering, a shout, and we scattered like crows from a shotgun as a rock slide ploughed into the packed earth where we’d been sitting.

  We rebuilt Abdul’s fire a safe distance away.

  That night I was lethargic yet restless and jumpy. The shit, the flies, even Kathleen’s proximity irritated me. Altitude gain. The mind can recognize the symptoms but not prevent them.

  Then next morning was pure joy. I set off early on the rising track that snaked across the hillside above the glacier. It was clear and cold, the rising sun levelled mile-long shadows across the valley, the great peaks stood frozen to attention against the high-altitude dark-blue sky. I was out in front, the only living being in sight. I felt like an arrow, moving further and further away from the tension that set me going, getting nearer and nearer to my destination. After the uncertainties and setbacks of the last weeks, nothing could stop me getting there now.

  Oh, yes? I looked at the mud pinnacles above me. They were studded with rocks between the size of cricket balls and semidetached villas. The trail was in their direct line of fire for a full hour or more Any one of those missiles could stop me from the Mustagh Tower – from meeting any future appointments at all for that matter, other than the one my father had now kept.

  But I was alive. I put Bob Marley on the Walkman and carried on singing, trusting my fate. This blue flower my boot brushes past, the grey glacier river below, the chough drifting soundlessly by, the early sun lighting up the pinnacles one after another like a row of flares – they all happen once only, but that once is perfection enough. Inside and outside, the world is one rarefied upthrust of joy.

  (Mal told me later that that section was probably the most dangerous of the entire walk-in. He had heard a whirring above him, ducked instinctively behind a ledge, a boulder crashed down 15 feet away from him. It is not a good place to put on headphones.)

  I came down to a glacier river where the trail ended. There I sat and waited for the others to catch up. Our next move was to wade across the river. It was stunningly cold and painful. We staggered carefully across, the water up to our thighs. Watching Shokat cross was our biggest laugh since the oxygen cylinder blew up in Askole. Abdul was red in the face trying to hold back his giggling; this was one unpleasant task Shokat couldn’t hand to someone else.

  We set off again, suffering shooting pains as the circulation came back to our feet. As always, when the day started to heat up, the early elation wore off. I was getting better at slipping into the trance state required for endurance. My mind obediently chased and retrieved the sticks I threw it as the hours went by. Kath caught my eye and smiled. Every step was one step nearer to our goal. We were going to make it.

  Finally, in the early afternoon, I climbed the last 400 feet up to the camp site at Urdukas, feeling breathless and sick. A big height gain today. Mansion-sized boulders, grass, flowers, shit, tent ledges cut out by the Duke of Abruzzi’s party a hundred years before. I slung down my pack and emptied the last of my water down my throat.

  Tony comes up to me, bright-eyed with excitement. ‘Have you seen the Tower?’ I stand up beside him, sight along his pointing arm. And there it is, across the glacier, ten miles away: journey’s end. The Mustagh Tower.

  First reaction one of relief. The left hand ridge running up from Col to Summit is less desperate than imagined, can’t see much below the Col. It’s big, beastly and fucking impressive – but feasible, to my unpractised eye.

  It’s a classic triangular pyramid. The Brown-Patey ridge on the left, the French ridge on the right, an unclimbed ridge in the middle. The ridges are white, the face between looks sheer granite. It’s stunningly impressive, but not impossible – the perfect mountain.

  Tony rabbits on, so revving with anticipation I half expect him just to start running towards the Tower. ‘It’ll be great … It’s such a fantastic mountain … It’ll be fantastic if I get to the summit, but that’s not the main thing.’

  ‘What is the main thing, Tony?’

  ‘For me it’s just being here, getting some climbing in.’

  Mal comes up. He’s thrown off the clouds that have hung over him the last few days, but as always he controls his delight. ‘Looks
as though I’m going to get some climbing, youth.’

  ‘Might have to do some myself.’

  We stand and look and look. That mountain over there has dominated our lives for six months. For the next weeks it’ll be our entire world. Kath comes up, tired but still game. We point it out to her and stand and look some more.

  We’re brimming with excitement. Tony in particular is like a child on the eve of its birthday. ‘We’ll be at Base Camp tomorrow!’ We put up our tents, take pictures, discuss our chances on the mountain. Our eyes return again and again like a compass needle to the magnetic Tower. How much will Jon and Sandy have done? Will the weather have kept them back? Mal hopes that they’ll have crossed the approach glacier and built up a good stash of food, tents and gear below the Col. They don’t have enough rope to fix the Col; all we can ask is that they’ve done the essential groundwork and are in good shape.

  Listening to Mal and Tony talk over their hopes and plans for the future – Nepal, Kenya, Peru, Alaska, maybe K2 somewhere down the line – I’m staggered again by the strength of their obsession. Nothing is ever enough to satisfy their hunger. As Jon said in ’Pindi, it is a vocation. Their lives are climbing or preparing to climb.

  I can relate to this only in terms of what writing is to me: the essential function of my being alive. Looking at the Tower, I realize there’s no way I want climbing that badly. For me it’s an enthralling secondary activity, something to do and get away with. It’s the same for Adrian. After Mustagh, if I get away with it, I go home and hang up my crampons and axes.

  The night before, as we lay in our bags before sleep – the only time of the day we’re intimate – Kath asked me again to promise not to go up to the Col.

  She seldom asks anything like that. I was touched and a little worried that she was worried enough to mention it. And I lay and asked myself again: have I the right balance of caution and drive? Why take the risk? I don’t need to, no one’s asking me to. Can it be worth it? There’s so many other things I want to do and be and live for – why gamble on Mustagh? To impress whom, to convince whom? Climbing’s not the biggest thing in my life, so why push my luck?